The Quest For Elegance

And indulging my inner perfectionist.

One thing about doing open-source projects like Navigator and Factory is that they let me indulge my inner perfectionist.

In a corporate setting there’s usually pressure to a find a solution that’s “good enough” for the problem at hand, so one can move on to the *next* problem. And the next. And the next.

In that world, shipping takes priority, and there’s always another ticket, another sprint, another deadline looming.

One is forced to “commit.”

So you get used to making peace with “good enough.”

You leave a TODO in the codebase. You don’t refactor that hack or kludge you copied from StackOverflow. You skip a test. Or two. Or three.

And in doing so you bend to the twin gods of time and management, thinking, perhaps, that one day you might be able to come back to that particular problem or revisit that section of the code.

But deep down, in your heart, in your soul… you know the reality.

That day will never come.

But my open-source projects are different. There I often have the luxury of spending hours or even days teasing out a solution to a particular problem.