If you’re sat there, in a coffee shop, or in your home office, or on your couch (or the toilet) and something is nagging you about the code you’re writing. You’re getting a little “imposters syndrome”-y.
There are a few key questions you can ask yourself to get out of that loop.
First off this is for people that work in teams. Not lone wolves shredding through code at lightening speed, mixing their html, jquery and php all in the same same file like it’s 2005.
What I am talking about here is for people working with other sane human beings who also value their sanity.
You’re not paid to be clever with what you do, to abstract out the wazoo or to optimise it to the point of counting microseconds.
You’re not paid to write tests or “clean code”
None of that shit matters.
So what does matter?
Nothing. Nothing matters. We’re all just the newest monkey on a piece of rock spinning 1000mph going round a burning ball of gas at 67,000mph. So let’s bear that in mind.
I’m going to take a quick detour…
In 2001 (22 fucking years ago…) the camera market was still dominated by cheap disposable film cameras. Digital cameras were starting to appear, and so two entrepreneurs decided to create a “digital disposable”.
The idea was you buy it, take your shots, take it back to Boots and they give you the prints in less than an hour.
It was dirt cheap. It had a cheap lens. less than 8mb of storage. They had to make a ton of tradeoffs so the price point competitive with disposable film cameras.
Boots would then send the shitty digital disposable back to the manufacturer to be refurbished and put it back on the shelf.
The idea didn’t work. People were keeping the cameras. Hacking them so they could upload the pictures to their PC’s themselves - or even just being content viewing them on the 1.4 inch LCD.
They did however, learn something incredibly valuable.
Good enough is more than good enough. They sold 3 million of the disposable digitals. The business failed terribly, but they realised that people, on the whole, don’t want perfect. They want it now.
They took these lessons and went on to build a very cheap video camera that became an insane hit and make them both multi-millionaires.
Now you. You already know this.
You know this when you illegally download that awful copy of the new Spiderman because you don’t want to wait for it to come to one of the 15 streaming services you already pay for.
You know this when you buy that terrible pink cable from Amazon because you need it yesterday.
You know this when you want to listen to something and you open up Spotify and stream a very low quality MP3 rather than going to buy the vinyl.
Obviously there are exceptions to these rules. You have the people using £10,000 SLR’s and downloading ultra high quality FLAC files. But those guys aren’t sane. We are.
So slow down. Ask yourself:
Is it good enough? Does it do the thing you need it to do?
Can your peers read it and understand your thinking? And by your peers, I mean you.
If someone (by someone, I mean you) changes something in 6 months time, and it would break the functionality for the enduser, will you know before they do? (read: unit/feature tests)
Is there a way of seeing how often it’s being used and will you know when it goes wrong?
Then it’s good enough. Screw that imposter syndrome. You’re doing fucking great. Get it in a PR and get onto the next thing. Move fast. Break shit.
Good enough is, usually, more than good enough.