The mind is a lot fresher after spending time away

I have found that I need to take 2 passes at a problem before getting it right and usually the second pass needs to be done after spending a day away from the task. My mind feels significantly fresher after spending time away from work and then coming back to a task. Things that I didn't notice before just jumps out at me, where as in other cases, I could look over something repeatedly and still overlook details.

I find this to be true to both writing and even programming. The first post of anything I make tends to filled with errors and even after double checking, I still tend to miss a lot of small mistakes. It's likely related to a bad habit of wanting to get something done as fast as possible and sometimes I find double-checking as a tedious task that gets in the way. One hitting the submit button, that feeling of needing to have something done as quickly as possible usually subsides and I am able to look at past work with a more critical eye.

There are times when I have been coding to find myself coming back to the code wondering to myself "what the hell was I thinking" when a much simpler solution exists. This is especially true when I make the mistake of designing a complex solution and thinking of the solution as clever.

For example, I managed to write a text parser with the feature that it could automatically detect if a text string was an integer, a floating point number, exponential or a date and automatically call the correct function to parse the data. The function was also extensible in that it could also be updated on the fly to auto-detect and parse other values.

I thought the smart thing to do was to create 2 functions, 1 to detect if a text string was of a certain type (returning true or false) and then a second function to perform the conversion and I had to make an elaborate system to keep the testing function and the parsing function paired together which I thought was kind of unweildy, but I managed to do it. A day later, I realized that I could just have 1 function that would either return a value or nothing depending if the parse failed or passed and used that as the indicator if the right function had been called.

I could have been bashing at a problem through an entire day with an inelegant solution... and I deplore inelegant solutions because why work hard on a bad solution when you could be spending time on a better one instead? Thinking like this is both a blessing and a curse because the resuts of my work varies between "really good" or "none."

Anyways, hopefully I'll be getting back to posting on a more regular basis. I have more pockets of time where I am able to think compared to before and I hope for this to continue.