Guy Reams (00:01.134)
Today is day 155, life design flaw, hard coding. So when I was younger in my career, I was teaching computer science. And so I decided to, you know, well, I had lots of smaller software development contracts that I was doing, that I would oftentimes put students or other people I found to work writing software.
Now, I only had a few contracts. It wasn't a major effort. But I did learn a lot. So I thought I would talk a little bit about one of the life lessons I learned in my early days of managing software developers. So there's this concept called design patterns or design flaws that are common and very repeatable in software development practices. One of those is that's.
very common is this pitfall of hard coding values, thresholds, credentials, or anything that's variable into your code base. The reason why is it's very problematic when you compile the code and have to go back and edit it, or it moves to a different environment or into a different condition, and therefore requires a lot of manual effort to fix it. Now, this may sound obvious today.
I mean, software develops so rapidly and is in such a heterogeneous environment on the cloud or whatever. So this is obvious. But from an historical perspective, this wasn't always so obvious. I mean, I remember doing some consulting work for clients when I was younger. And inevitably, you would find hard -coded value somewhere in software that was causing a particular problem.
potential challenge. So anyway, there you go. That's my personal anecdote about this. So hard coding is definitely a bad practice and shouldn't be done. I think everybody knows that. But this applies to your own personal life. Let me talk about why. I realized recently after my wife asked me to do something for her and I had to go do it and I had to remember what it was that I did.
Guy Reams (02:25.325)
So it was a service that we had and I had to go find the username and password. I had to find the website. I didn't even remember the website. So it took me a long time to figure this out. And I finally went in there and I had to repeat all the work I had done because I could not remember even what email address I used. So all of this stuff was written down somewhere, hard -coded, but not in an accessible format to me.
So this was extremely limiting and inefficient to do this over and over and over again. So that really got me to thinking, you know.
If I were to outsource something, like if I were to hire somebody to do something for me, it would force me to actually figure out all the steps that person would have to do in order to accomplish the task. And I would have to remove any hard -coded values out of that so that they would know what they are. Like, I couldn't rely on my brain to remember the password. It would have to be,
I would have to write that down and put that in a place where people could access and reference it. So I started thinking through all my daily and weekly tasks. How many of them could actually be outsourced if I wanted to? And I realized that hardly any of them. You know, I'm like the hard coding programmer from yesterday. I have a lot of job security. Nobody can fire me and my family because if they got rid of me, nobody would remember any of the passwords or nothing.
So I was like, this is not good, right? But why is it not good? Well, it's not good because there's little precious things I hold onto, processes that I hold onto that I think that are easy because they're in my head, but in reality, they're not that easy. So I started thinking through a couple of the things that I was doing. All right, bill pay. So I've gotten bill pay pretty automated.
Guy Reams (04:31.437)
But there's, it's still manual for me to do, so there's that. And then secondly, there's five or six annoying bills every month that have to be dealt with outside of bill pay. And those are hard -coded. It's a process that only I know. And the values for getting into this are only what I know. So that's come, now there's a way for me to solve this problem. In fact, I even bought software to solve this problem.
So I have like this, you know, automatic password recording software that I can use for this purpose. And it actually will automate certain log -ons. So I could have it automate log -ons to these sites so that I could literally have somebody do it for me if I wanted to. But no, instead, what I do is I manually go through it every month and I remember, it takes me probably about 30, 40 minutes to do these every month, right?
But because I haven't sat down, so I decided, you know what, I'm going to do it. I'm going to treat this like it was going to be outsourced to somebody. So I sat down and I figured it out. How could I outsource these five tasks every month to somebody else if I wanted to? What would I have to do to remove any variability out of it? And I finally figured out a way to do it. It wasn't that hard. It took me about an hour of work. And now those five tasks take me about
five minutes to do every month. I can get done with them in five minutes. So I just reduced, I mean just look at the math. What was taking me 30 minutes every month to do, which by the way I would always procrastinate and never do, but now what was taking me, now takes me five minutes to do. So I significantly decreased my workload, right? Just simply by visualizing,
How can I deal with it as an outsourcing basis? So my encouragement then is to treat your personal task management, your personal goals, as a shift towards outsourcing. Even though you may not actually outsource it, you may want to think that through. What could I do to simplify this process? And what am I holding onto that's so precious that I could as easily give up that hard -coded value and not have to deal with it anymore? So.
Guy Reams (06:57.549)
I think this is a path to greater efficiency and clarity by figuring out what would I do if I had to outsource my life, what would I do to do it? Thank you.