Logo
14 November 2022

Doing exactly one thing at a time

I first heard this from Alex Vasquez of CodePen:

Only do one of these at a time: learn new tech or solve a new problem. Do not do both. One is a magical number. Do one thing at a time.

(Here’s where they say it, the entire podcast is a great listen: https://blog.codepen.io/2022/08/03/379-chris-alex-have-been-running-codepen-for-10-years-what-have-they-learned-heres-the-top-10/#t=00:23:25)

It sounds so simple, so obvious, but is such incredible advice. It has taken me a while to really internalize why, and how to apply it.

Alex quotes a similar example, but for this blog, I was tempted to experiment with new, shiny tech as I usually like to do, but I stopped myself. You see the whole reason I even built this was to make sure I had a place to write about new things I learn when I learn them. You might not believe this, but this is how I ended up here:

  1. I was talking to a friend over Zoom, and thought really? This is the best we can do? Let me see why video conferencing is so hard.
  2. I went in deep, and as I was building the website, realized that I wanted to fetch fonts from a CDN. I wasn’t about to feed Google, so I thought I’d take a detour and build a font service on Cloudflare Workers.
  3. I spent a week on this (I’ll release it when the frontend is ready and the performance is acceptable), and realized that there wasn’t a cheap, fast replicated database to match the distributed-ness of my Workers.
  4. I know! Let me see what it’ll take to deploy RocksDB to Fly.io regions across the world! One thing led to another and I’m reading up on Raft and building a distributed database of my own. Oh, and I’ll build it in Rust because I’ve been itching to find a decently large project to learn how to ship bigger things in that language.
  5. Gotta learn about TLS if I’m to secure this. Like, really learn TLS, all the details.
  6. I’ve been learninig tons of new things everyday, and I wanted to be able to write them down, mostly for my future self. I would have liked to tweet about it, but I never gather to motivation to do it, so I’ll just write stuff down on Notion.
  7. Hey I’ll build a blog, shouldn’t take more than a day.

I fully intend to unwind my stack and eventually get back to my video conferencing app, and I genuinely enjoy these detours (they teach me so many things I would never think to investigate), but they also leave a trail of unfinished, abandoned projects. I want to finish things. I know I won’t release them till they’re just right, but I just want to get to the point where things mostly work, so I can actually start perfecting them (“make it work, make it right, make it fast” and all that).

Fortunately, Alex’s words helped me ship this blog in 5 hours (!!!). I wanted to check out Astro, VitePress (I don’t even know Vue, I thought I’d pick it up as I go 😐), and so many other things, but I would have wasted away an entire Saturday if I went down this path. Instead, I picked my go-to stack (Remix, Tailwind, CF Pages), and gave myself 4 hours to finish the whole thing. The end result has to make it easy to just write things down and publish them as quickly as possible. Can’t look ugly either. I overshot by an hour, but I solved one problem at a time (building the thing, instead of pretending to build the thing by learning Vue/Astro or whatever).

On a similar note, I’ve been trying to implement TLS for my distributed database, but in the spirit of “one thing at a time”, I spun up a brand new project, and focused on just TLS, outside of my database, and guess what, it came so naturally. Integrating it into my database took less than a day. Doing them both together would likely have cost me an entire weekend, most likely more.

All this being said, I think there’s nuance to this advice, and there’s a skill to applying it that I’d like to develop. I could have started building my database in TypeScript, so I could focus on building the database instead of struggling with a new language, but I think doing it in Rust has made the thing challenging enough to keep my focus.

Anyway, if anyone’s reading this, solve only one problem at a time.