This is actually great. They had a bunch of problems to solve with limited interface options. They picked the simplest combination of options, found the solution worked and stuck with it. All too often I find myself looking at something and saying "ewww!" and writing my own code without exploring the other, less glamorous options.
This weekend I nearly slammed my head into the wall after spending half the day implementing and testing shared caching for my high volume distributed web scraper according to part 6 of the HTTP RFC (aside: I cannot believe how something so simple has been made so complicated)... only to remember I'd totally forgotten I could just stick a caching proxy server (e.g. nginx) in front of the scraper and have it do all the hard work. Later I remembered why I wanted to control caching, primarily to do with some future plans, but right now I could have gotten along just fine with a caching proxy server.
When I'm tired and not thinking straight I often dive straight into the next task without asking the right questions. I've been trying to get into the habit by creating tasks in PivotalTracker and looking over other stuff to remind myself of how much else there is to do so I'm forced to ask myself "is this really what I should be working on next?", but I still slip up even after YEARS of relearning this lesson. The annoying thing is I'm very good at planning and allocating tasks to a team, then managing their progress, but very inconsistent when I'm both the manager and developer.
This weekend I nearly slammed my head into the wall after spending half the day implementing and testing shared caching for my high volume distributed web scraper according to part 6 of the HTTP RFC (aside: I cannot believe how something so simple has been made so complicated)... only to remember I'd totally forgotten I could just stick a caching proxy server (e.g. nginx) in front of the scraper and have it do all the hard work. Later I remembered why I wanted to control caching, primarily to do with some future plans, but right now I could have gotten along just fine with a caching proxy server.
When I'm tired and not thinking straight I often dive straight into the next task without asking the right questions. I've been trying to get into the habit by creating tasks in PivotalTracker and looking over other stuff to remind myself of how much else there is to do so I'm forced to ask myself "is this really what I should be working on next?", but I still slip up even after YEARS of relearning this lesson. The annoying thing is I'm very good at planning and allocating tasks to a team, then managing their progress, but very inconsistent when I'm both the manager and developer.