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I'm a lazy dev

One thing about me that I think surprises a lot of folks is that I’m actually a pretty lazy developer.

It’s not that I don’t want to do any hard word. I obviously often write my own helper functions instead of using off-the-shelf solutions.

What I mean is, I don’t like to have to think.

Cognitive overload ruins inertia

Recently, I’ve written about using let vs. var to declare variables, or fetch() vs. XHR for API calls.

A lot of folks wrote to me ask when I choose one approach over another. I don’t.

I hate the cognitive overload that comes from trying to hyper-optimize choices like that. If I’m going to use let for variables, I use it for all of them. If I’m going to use fetch(), I use it for everything.

I always use querySelector() over getElementById(), even when the selector is a single ID. I obsessively document my code.

All of this comes from a desire to remove the need to think about things that don’t matter all that much.

Good programming is good problem-solving

When I’m writing code, I’d much rather spend time thinking about what steps I need to take to complete a task than which method I should use to get an element.

What makes programming fun (for me, anyways) is solving interesting problems, not the minutia of specific methods and approaches.

That may not be you. I know a lot folks who enjoy the challenge of writing code that’s as finely optimized as it can be. If you’re like that, awesome! Follow your bliss.

But if you’re more like me, if that’s not exciting for you, that doesn’t make you a bad developer. It just means you prefer to spend your energy on other things.