Advice to My Younger Self

CRANK

When I was 16 I was visited by a man who said he had come from the future. He had traveled twenty years back to 1999 to sit down with me and have a chat.We talked for an hour or so, and in the end he gave me a few pieces of advice. I have lived by these and they have served me well, and now I dispense this advice to you.Become allergic to The ChurnFirst he warned me about the churn, and I have since learned to recognize it.The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around.Many people are blind to The Churn. They waste days, weeks, months of their lives without blinking, or worse, they get a perverse sense of achievement because the thing which was working fine works again.The Churn is a resource sapping disease, and the first step to recovering from The Churn is to recognize The …