Don't be afraid of rabbit holes
I’ve gotten myself into some deep rabbit holes in the course of everyday software development. I find some surprising behavior, or an apparent bug, and before I know it, 57 tabs are open in my browser. They hold a record of my journey through the source code of 5 different codebases, their GitHub Issues, their fork’s GitHub Issues, Stack Overflow, paywalled Medium articles that weren’t worth opening and, these days, a conversation with a helpful-but-not-really LLM.
I probably found a way to solve the problem 46 tabs ago, but I couldn’t let go until I understood exactly why, for example, Containers using glibc v2.34+ don’t work on some older docker versions. The letting go part is tricky. Rabbit holes are often fractal, which is a problem. There’s always something more to discover.
But I try to force myself to stop at some point. That point is usually around the place where I am not learning anything new about the underlying principles, and what’s left are implementation details of the various systems involved. In other words, when I’ve acquired some insight that is somewhat timeless, and useful elsewhere.
