Dealing with Code
Developers often get stuck working on simple or well-known tasks when starting a new project. This tends to happen at either extreme: in a brand-new project with nothing defined, or in a very old one with too many established definitions.
In a greenfield project, where all possibilities are open, it’s easy to experience blank-page syndrome — like a writer frozen at the beginning of a book, paralyzed by the infinite options. Having every possible choice can make us doubt every decision, turning everything from API design to code structure into an internal struggle to find the "best" approach.
Frameworks help a lot, not just because they implement and abstract common functionality beyond the raw language, but also because they come with conventions — either defined by their creators or shaped by their communities — that help narrow the scope of decisions a developer has to make.
On the opposite end, the older a project is, the more layers of decisions it accumulates. Every developer who has contributed to it has left a personal mark, and over time the codebase becomes a patchwork quilt. Trying to figure out how to work within it — what style to adopt among the many left behind — is both stressful and exhausting.
Documentation is essential. Working in an old project turns the developer into a mix of archaeologist, historian, and private investigator: piecing together fragments too old to have written records, diving into scattered documents, and eventually hunting down and interrogating the “suspects” who worked on it in the past.
I suspect there's a sweet spot — when a project is mature enough that the main decisions have already been made, yet still fresh enough not to have been corrupted by time. When the documentation is recent and the paths are still open, work flows smoothly, and joining the team feels like a pleasure.
Over time, we all end up working on projects at different points in this spectrum. Sometimes, our productivity and mood soar; other times, they plummet. But it’s not our fault — nothing has changed in us. So blaming ourselves or lamenting our bad luck out loud serves no purpose: we just have to power through, do our work professionally, and hope the next hand deals us better cards.
exit(0);