Alright, let’s talk about today’s session. I decided to tackle that messy bit of old code again. You know the one, the piece that always felt like juggling spaghetti.
So, I sat down this morning, coffee in hand, ready to wrestle with it. First thing, I just stared at it for a good ten minutes. Seriously. Just letting the sheer complexity wash over me. It’s got layers upon layers, patches on patches. Stuff added years ago by folks who aren’t even here anymore.
My goal wasn’t to rewrite the whole thing. Nah, been down that road, it’s a trap. My goal was simpler: make one part, just one tiny part, make sense. That’s when I started thinking about what I call the “don yee” approach. It’s not fancy. It basically means: Don’t overthink it, you eejit. Just find the simplest path that works.
Trying the ‘don yee’ thing
So, I picked a single function. Ignored everything else screaming for attention around it. I traced its input, traced its output. Found a bunch of weird conditional stuff inside that honestly didn’t seem to do much anymore. Maybe it did, once upon a time.
- I commented out the first weird block.
- Ran the tests. Still passed. Okay.
- Commented out the second block.
- Ran the tests again. Passed again. Huh.
- Did this a few more times. Found a lot of dead wood.
It wasn’t fast work. It was tedious. Step by step. Comment out, test, delete if safe. Keep it simple. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to refactor into some grand, elegant design. Just chop chop chop away the nonsense.
By lunchtime, that one function was maybe half the size and actually readable. It does the same thing. Maybe not perfectly optimized according to some textbook, but it works, and now I understand it. That’s the “don yee” win for today.
Why this matters, I guess
It reminds me of my first job fixing bikes down at old Mr. Henderson’s shop. He wasn’t about fancy tools or the ‘right’ way according to the manual. He’d just tinker. He’d say, “Son, just make it work smooth. Don’t need to rebuild the whole thing if the chain’s just skipping.”
We get so caught up sometimes in trying to make everything perfect, following all the best practices, using the newest frameworks. We build these massive, complicated things. Like that Bilibili setup someone mentioned – Java, Go, C#, Scala, C++, PHP… sounds like a headache waiting to happen. Everyone in their own little world, building their own little perfect piece, but the whole thing becomes a tangled mess.
Sometimes, just making one part work smoothly, making it simple and understandable, that’s enough. It’s not glamorous. It won’t win awards. But it keeps the wheels turning. That’s what the “don yee” practice felt like today. Just keeping the wheels turning. Felt pretty good, actually.
