In Defense Of Laziness

The parentage of invention is something of an open question. It's often been said that necessity is the mother of invention, and that seems reasonable, but who's the father? I've heard a bunch of different answers, including opportunity and ability, but my money's on laziness.

But it's a special kind of laziness. Not the kind that sweeps the dust under the rug instead of cleaning up or the kind that finishes a project and leaves the tools wherever they lay. I'm talking about the kind of laziness that knows the priorities. The kind that realizes that doing things in the right order minimizes rework. The kind that, when digging a ditch, makes it big enough to handle the expected flow and some more, but doesn't build one big enough to handle the Mississippi river.

And that goes for developers as well. Good developers have that special kind of laziness. They know that if your method/library/application doesn't do what it's supposed to it doesn't matter how clean the interface is. They know that when you're dealing with terabyte datasets a few kilobytes of local data isn't something to worry about.

YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) is laziness. It's not doing work before you need to. You might never need it, so be lazy.

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is laziness. Whether it's using someone else's library/package/service/tool, or refactoring to get rid of duplication, or writing and maintaining less code. Be lazy and free up the time to do something more important.

DevOps is all about laziness. Automate all the things. Make them redundant. Make them resilient. Be lazy and build tools and systems to manage the day-to-day so you don't have to.

To be clear, this doesn't mean skip the important things. Don't skip the unit tests or the code review. Don't skip on requirements or talking to customers. Don't skimp on being thorough.

So be lazy, but only at the right times