Are all hacks bad?
Sometimes ‘short cuts’ are a necessary evil, especially when time is of the essence.
When you’re on the battlefield, and you’ve just been shot in the toe – the best that the medic will do is to tourniquette your foot and send you back into battle!* 🤕
During projects, sometimes there is a critical need for solutions that isn’t the optimum choice, but the key point is to make sure we make that decision with our eyes open. 👀
My team may come to me with a problem and recommend an option that could potentially cause issues in the long run, because we need to implement the fix NOW, before the next payroll run.
As such, I was able to justify the decision.
I also made sure to make plans to rectify the issue properly later on – which is something I am comfortable to do.
I think that whatever decision we make, it is the right one … as long as we do it mindfully, and think through long term implications of our decisions.
You don’t want to “hack yourself into the corner”, as Johann says in his post. That is a very bad place to be, for all sorts of gnarly reasons.
Also, you don’t want to be #RarFood.
And nobody wants that! 😱
* which I imagine might happen in my no-real-battlefield-experience-except-for-WoW-gaming-raids world 😁
ps: This was inspired by Johann Furmann‘s post today about accruing tech debt when trying to get away with ‘cheaper’ #Salesforce licenses – check out the link in the comments
