BRIEFS logo BRIEFS

Consider Long-Term Impacts and Deletability

01/07/2021 , 2m, 57s

Hi there friends So today I wanted to talk about how a water damage thing that I discovered in my house and it relates to software. So a few days ago, we discovered in two of our closets in the basement that we have some water damage on the baseboards and the carpet.

And we had no idea where this came from or how long had been or where it came like what the cause of the the problem was. So, I eventually found out that it was our water or not our water heater, but the furnace and it has some condensation and so there's this.

Pipe that will take that condensation out of the house and there was a leak there just a little small little leak that it would drip like maybe once a minute not very much but this had clearly been going on for months and we just never noticed and eventually, you know, really damaged our baseboards and and the carpet and everything.

So that would that's super annoying because now we're gonna have to you know, replace a bunch of stuff and it's gonna be expensive and we have homeowners insurance but yeah, what a pain. So I always thinking about how this is related to software.And that like there are often little things that you may or may not know about in your software that like little abstractions that grow over time or little things that you need, you know, you need to deal with but you never make time for them because by themselves they're not like a really big deal.

Like for us we we didn't know about this, but there was this little drip and it really wasn't a big deal but after a long amount of time that turns into something just so much worse. And it's always this balancing act ofDo I invest a bunch of time into making this thing not so bad.

So like how do I spend some time fixing this problem or do I just let it continue to be a bit of a problem because it's not that big of a problem. It doesn't justify the time that would take to make it better. And like you with software like with the house that's that's a little bit different but with software you can so easily just throw stuff away and so you need to also consider like if I work on this and and make this aspect better.

Will that actually return on my investment or do we end up to deleting that feature completely and get rid of all of that code and stuff. And so my investment into making that code better is just gone. And we don't really do that with homes, but yeah, it was just something that was kind of on my mind of a you know, it's something to keep in mind that when you do have little problems that seem, you know, the subtraction is in all that great and so you slip through a code review or whatever.

But think about the long-term impact of those things and also consider the deletability of things. I hope that'sAt least interesting. See you later.