There's a kind of debugging I call "flailing"—a desperate, theory-less "jiggling the handle" one can stumble into after extended failure. Found myself there today on hour 3 of JS build system BS. In such situations I find Pirsig's treatise on "gumption traps" a good antidote.
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If Bob had known about webpack it would have been called Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance.
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My grief today was indeed caused by Webpack. The solution to my grief was moving to Rollup, which also required a configuration file about 1/4 the length.
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An antidote I’ve found is doing some reading “around” the problem, i.e. halting the frontal attack, and giving myself a rest by spending some time filling my brain with adjacent material in the hope a new connective bridge is formed.
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So, no looming deadline, then... 😉😀
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Yes! I've found walking away from a problem is helpful. More often than not, googling and trying out different solutions if you don't understand the underlying problem can lead you into a gumption trap.
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Another solution that I always forget is to "try both ways". Many times the time thinking about going with solution A or B is greater than just trying...
TIL There is a term for everything you experienced in life if you read enough. 📖
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I wrote tweet series on product onboarding inspired by Gumption traps, specifically the Setbacks.
:)
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“Working Backwards” is Amazon's brilliant approach to product development.
We took this approach and applied it to product onboarding, the make or break phase of any product.
I’m sharing 3 core concepts of the onboarding, all qualitative in nature.
@TweetSamG
#PLG
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