In praise of a backlog
I have not written about Buttondown in a while, because of two reasons:
- I have been very busy! The maelstrom of a year’s end is at times all-consuming, and with no small degree of self-restraint I’ve been sidelining a lot of side project work in favor of ostensibly more important things.
- Writing prose about Buttondown is almost always more difficult than writing code about Buttondown. If I have an unexpected hour free at the end of the day, its much easier to pick an item off the backlog and hack on it for a little bit than it is to commit to writing.
About that “picking an item off the backlog” thing — I am incredibly judicious of cataloging everything that could be done with Buttondown on GitHub Issues:
I categorize everything into one of five pretty self-explanatory groups:
This isn’t particularly novel or sophisticated, but it works pretty well, especially because I have different modes of productivity that enable different kinds of work.
Sometimes I’m in a bug-squashing mood, where I crave the sense of order and completion that comes from writing a regression test, fixing the issue, then pushing things out.
Sometimes I want to make something look nicer (okay, I know that’s not what design is, but that’s usually what my label means — improving the way users handle the application.)
Sometimes I want to frolic in the proverbial green field, and I start pecking away on a new feature.
Strict adherence to keeping a backlog has granted me a certain level of calm when it comes to working on non-trivial projects. If a codebase is the manifestation of your understanding of how an application should work, the backlog is the manifestation of your understanding of how an application could work. Sometimes that’s lossy or messy — I have a backlog item simply titled “Themes?” — but it lets me clear my head of what I could be working on and focus on what I should be working on.
And that’s the crux of it.
I never have to spend a minute thinking to myself “what was that one thing that I thought about doing if I had twenty minutes free?”
This is an important thing: when it is December and there is jazz to be listened to and books to be read and games of Uno to be played with far-flung friends, time is precious.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you see a dog in a sweater, like I just did outside Café Solstice.