Don’t outrun your headlights.
At 70 miles per hour, your stopping distance is about 3 times the average distance illuminated by your headlights. If you run into any problems not visible on that narrow line of light, you’re in trouble.
But what does this have to do with programming?
Just as with the headlights, when it comes to development, we can’t see far into the future. When looking “off-axis from our headlights”, the road becomes darker and darker.
Going back to a previous chapter on making predictions about the length of projects, today’s passage stressed the importance of keeping an appropriate speed limit; only taking small and necessary steps towards the future.
Any task which is too big, perhaps more than 3 steps into the future, one where an educated guess descends into speculation, this is a task which is simply too big to meaningfully infer information from:
“Always take small, deliberate steps, checking for feedback and adjusting before proceeding. Consider that the rate of feedback is your speed limit. You never take on a step or a task that’s “too big.” “
If you’re going so fast you can’t receive good feedback on new developments, it’s probably time to slow down.
Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow!
#PathToSWE
