Okay, so I spent some time looking into this Stewart Lancaster thing. Didn’t really know much about it beforehand, just heard the name floating around, you know? Seemed like one of those things people mention but maybe don’t actually do.
Getting Started
First off, I tried to figure out what the core idea was. It wasn’t super clear right away. Lots of talk, but finding a simple ‘how-to’ was a bit of a pain. I decided to just jump in and try applying what I thought it was about to a small side project I had lying around. Nothing critical, just something I could mess up without causing too much trouble.
I basically started by reorganizing my workspace. That seemed like a tangible first step people associated with this Lancaster approach, at least from the bits I gathered. Cleared my desk, put tools in specific spots. Felt a bit silly, like I was just tidying up, but hey, gotta start somewhere.
The Process – Trying it Out
Then came the actual task. I was working on refining some old code. The idea, as I understood it from the Lancaster stuff, was about breaking things down into super small, manageable steps. Smaller than I usually would.
My steps looked something like this:
- Identify one tiny function to improve. Just one.
- Write down exactly what I wanted to change.
- Make only that one change.
- Test it immediately. Like, right away.
- If it worked, commit it. If not, figure out why before touching anything else.
Honestly, it felt slow. Like, really slow at first. I’m used to juggling a few things at once, making bigger changes. This felt like walking when I could be running. There were moments I almost gave up and went back to my old ways.
I kept pushing through, though. Forced myself to stick to the tiny steps. Did one function, then another, then another. It was tedious, I won’t lie. Required a lot more discipline than I expected.
What Happened?
After a couple of days working like this, something interesting happened. Yeah, it was slow getting started, but I made almost zero mistakes that needed backtracking. Usually, I’d make a bunch of changes, run tests, find bugs, and spend ages figuring out which change broke things. This time? Each step was so small, if something went wrong, I knew exactly where the problem was – it was the tiny thing I just did.
So, the overall time spent wasn’t actually much longer, maybe even a bit shorter because I cut out all that debugging headache. The code ended up cleaner too, because I was forced to think about each tiny piece more carefully.
So, my takeaways were:
- It feels painfully slow initially.
- Requires more discipline than you’d think.
- Dramatically reduces debugging time later.
- Leads to cleaner, more thought-out results (at least for me).
It’s not magic. It’s just a very deliberate way of working. I don’t know if I’ll use it for everything, especially when I need to bang something out quickly. But for tasks that need careful handling, or when I’m working on tricky code? Yeah, I can see myself using this Stewart Lancaster approach again. It’s kinda grown on me, despite the slow start.
