Alright, folks, gather ’round. Today’s post is a bit of a doozy, and it’s all about swallowing your pride and admitting when you’re wrong. The title says it all: “admission of defeat.” Let me tell you the story of how I messed up big time, and what I did to fix it.
It all started with a simple task. I needed to create a system for managing user permissions. I, in my infinite wisdom, thought, “Pfft, I can bang this out in a weekend. No problem!” So, I started, head full of steam, and chose to go with a custom-built solution. Why use something off-the-shelf when I could build it myself, right?
Wrong.
The Downward Spiral
- Day 1: Felt like a coding god. I created the basic database schema, wrote a few functions, and felt pretty good about my progress. I imagined myself a coding god, delivering this great feature to the users.
- Day 2: The cracks started to show. Edge cases, weird user scenarios, and unforeseen complications popped up left and right. My “simple” system quickly morphed into a tangled mess of conditional statements and database queries.
- Day 3: Full-blown panic mode. I was drowning in bugs. My code was a monstrosity. I spent hours debugging, only to create more problems. I googled endlessly, tried different approaches. My custom solution, in it’s original intention, seemed very distant. I felt so overwhelmed, my work had been meaningless.
- Day 4: I spent the whole morning on looking at my codes, and concluded there’s no way to fix it.
The Turning Point
That’s when it hit me. I was in over my head. I had to admit defeat. My custom solution was a failure. So, I took a deep breath, deleted a week’s worth of work (ouch!), and started over.
This time, I went with a well-established, open-source authorization library. I read the documentation, followed the examples, and within a day, I had a working, robust system. It was a fraction of the code I had written before, and it handled all the edge cases I had been struggling with.
I finished my project on time.
The lesson? Sometimes, the best solution isn’t the one you build yourself. Sometimes, you have to admit defeat, learn from your mistakes, and embrace the work of others. It’s a humbling experience, but it’s one that makes you a better developer in the long run. Don’t be afraid to say “I messed up” and start fresh. It might just save you a whole lot of headache.
