Consider Long-Term Impacts and Deletability - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

Hi there friends So today I wanted to talk about how a water damage thing
that I discovered in my house and it relates to software. So a few daysago, we discovered in two of our closets in the basement that we have some
water damage on the baseboards and the carpet.And we had no idea where this came from or how long had been or where it
came like what the cause of the the problem was. So, I eventually found outthat it was our water or not our water heater, but the furnace and it has
some condensation and so there's this.
Pipe that will take that condensation out of the house and there was a leakthere just a little small little leak that it would drip like maybe once a
minute not very much but this had clearly been going on for months and wejust never noticed and eventually, you know, really damaged our baseboards
and and the carpet and everything.So that would that's super annoying because now we're gonna have to you
know, replace a bunch of stuff and it's gonna be expensive and we have
homeowners insurance but yeah, what a pain. So I always thinking about howthis is related to software.And that like there are often little things
that you may or may not know about in your software that like littleabstractions that grow over time or little things that you need, you know,
you need to deal with but you never make time for them because bythemselves they're not like a really big deal.
Like for us we we didn't know about this, but there was this little drip
and it really wasn't a big deal but after a long amount of time that turns
into something just so much worse. And it's always this balancing act ofDo
I invest a bunch of time into making this thing not so bad.So like how do I spend some time fixing this problem or do I just let it
continue to be a bit of a problem because it's not that big of a problem.
It doesn't justify the time that would take to make it better. And like you
with software like with the house that's that's a little bit different but
with software you can so easily just throw stuff away and so you need toalso consider like if I work on this and and make this aspect better.
Will that actually return on my investment or do we end up to deleting thatfeature completely and get rid of all of that code and stuff. And so my
investment into making that code better is just gone. And we don't really
do that with homes, but yeah, it was just something that was kind of on mymind of a you know, it's something to keep in mind that when you do have
little problems that seem, you know, the subtraction is in all that greatand so you slip through a code review or whatever.
But think about the long-term impact of those things and also consider thedeletability of things. I hope that'sAt least interesting. See you later.

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