Description: african software developer by birth, by choice, for life
All my models start messy. Yet, I find that my messy models are actually quite useful. It forces me to acknowledge my ignorance. The longer I feign ignorance, the longer it takes for the mess to surface. The more I appeal to my ego with “Hey, look! My model is very cool!”, the longer I delay learning something useful.
I caught myself saying this the other day and it made me think about how I deal with a mess. For me, a messy problem is one that has more than 2 inputs and outputs. My brain struggles to resolve that. I just can’t do NxM matrices in my head.
The first thing I do is accept the mess and then I play with these 3 techniques. There are others but I find that I lean on these early in the exploration. I also don’t have a recipe or process of which technique I use when. I simply try something that looks interesting to me, or the focus on a part that is most obscure.