"In grand scheme of things, small things matter because they are indicative of situations in which big things are being done" (said who? me, of course)
I will explain this with two examples that are close to my heart:
Code Quality: Listing down two very common issues that you will come across:
- Absence of documentation in code (Code comments or javadocs/interface definitions)
- Improper variable names
Apparently they have no impact on the code itself, but more often than not it describes the situation in which the code was written. There are multiple possibilities. Code written by a careless programmer with no constraints or written by a good programmer with time constraints and so on. And none of these are favorable.
Broken support System in an organization/project: Its easy to ignore small hiccups (just like punctuations) in support services, since they don't have much to do with the revenue collection directly. If you find yourself struggling to keep up your regular services at an acceptable level, there is a bigger problem to handle than just fixing those day to day issues. Its not about that one thing remaining incomplete, its about fostering an attitude; "its ok to have things incomplete". If overlooked, these things become a norm and end up destroying the culture.
The idea here is, to use small things as god sent warnings about bigger problems. They are the just the symptoms indicative of the actual (bigger) problem.
I will explain this with two examples that are close to my heart:
Code Quality: Listing down two very common issues that you will come across:
- Absence of documentation in code (Code comments or javadocs/interface definitions)
- Improper variable names
Apparently they have no impact on the code itself, but more often than not it describes the situation in which the code was written. There are multiple possibilities. Code written by a careless programmer with no constraints or written by a good programmer with time constraints and so on. And none of these are favorable.
Broken support System in an organization/project: Its easy to ignore small hiccups (just like punctuations) in support services, since they don't have much to do with the revenue collection directly. If you find yourself struggling to keep up your regular services at an acceptable level, there is a bigger problem to handle than just fixing those day to day issues. Its not about that one thing remaining incomplete, its about fostering an attitude; "its ok to have things incomplete". If overlooked, these things become a norm and end up destroying the culture.
The idea here is, to use small things as god sent warnings about bigger problems. They are the just the symptoms indicative of the actual (bigger) problem.
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