Dust and time
A couple things about clothes moths:
- It is impossible for me to not type clothes moths as clothes mothes. The frictional contrast of
thesandthsis anathema. - I did not know, until searching around in preparation for this week’s update, that clothes moths were an entirely different thing than just regular moths. I figured they just liked old clothes and open lights; I can’t much blame them.
- When I was a kid, and even still now in an abstract sense, I didn’t understand exactly where clothes moths came from. In my head they sort of just popped into existence whenever there were sufficiently old or musty clothes, ethereal vultures ready to feast, birthed only by dust and time. (I have since learned that this is untrue.)
I had a productive weekend (in the sense that I got a lot of stuff done on Buttondown, which is perhaps a lossy signal for productivity, but I digress.)
I spent it working on a couple fun features that revolve around a couple corners of the codebase that I haven’t touched in a while: scheduling, markdown parsing, things that I worked on back in August or so — which wasn’t that long ago, but in codebase years that’s practically eons, and I was struck by all the little things that seemed eaten up by moths over the past few months — the kludgy use of signals and actions when I could have used v-model here, the shitty CSS there. Lots of blemishes and bent abstractions.
When coding, and especially when in flow, I have the zeal of a dog running leashless in a park while also sporting the distractability of a dog running leashless in a park — if I see a thing that can be improved, I must improve it, or at least make a note of it for later (but generally the former — especially if its a two line fix or something trivial). And I’m not even seeking these things out — they seek me out, as if underlined with red squiggles, as if in dazzling neon but with a single letter burnt out.
There are tactics to remediate this on large teams; periodic technical reviews, code audits, that kind of thing. And there are arguments that the little imperfections revealed over time are better left untouched until they absolutely require action: so many phrases that I know to be at least somewhat true, the better shipped than perfect posters papering hundreds of startup office walls, decree otherwise. “Technical debt” is used as a pejorative, but “debt” is a good thing, you know?
Still.
It feels good to fight against the ceaseless march of entropy, to pledge fealty to the church of tiny victories. And so I litter my pull requests with these tiny cleanup commits along the way, even though it makes the review process a little harder. (And thanks, as always, to Iheanyi for reviewing.)
Eventually I might get disciplined — and talented — enough to not find a litter of moths every time I open a neglected file. For now, though, I’ll grin and bear it and fix what I can with the energy I have.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you buy a new sweater and that it fits perfectly.