Lesson Learned: Start Small, Stay Sane Posted by Justin Minnaar Over the past few days, I’ve learned a hard but valuable lesson — one I think many developers and creators can relate to. I was rushing to build a product. I had a vision, a roadmap, and a thousand ideas swirling in my head. I wanted it all: a sleek design, robust features, scalability, security, CI/CD pipelines, database management, user authentication... the whole commercial-grade package. But somewhere along the way, I got overwhelmed. The complexity snowballed. I found myself lost in the weeds — trying to anticipate every future use case, every edge condition, every possible feature. And instead of progress, I hit paralysis. The Turning Point The breakthrough came when I reminded myself of something deceptively simple: start small . So, I’ve reset. I’m now building from the ground up using a basic framework. My first goal? Just get the home page working. Nothing fancy — just something visible, functional,...
I converted one of our libraries to C# 8.0 and turned on the 'nullable' and 'nullable references' options. I was pleasantly surprised to find several potential bugs where the passing of a null value would have caused a null exception, and it was simple enough to fix these. (This library was built without unit tests, horror!) I found a few interesting things though. In the following function, we receive a warning from the compiler about a possible null dereference error. At first I wondered if using the base string functions, instead of the above, would resolve this: var value = "some string"; var empty = string.IsNullOrEmpty(value); if (empty) return; value = value.Trim(); // still getting a possible null deference So I changed the code to the following, and the problem goes away: var value = "some string"; if (x.IsNullOrEmpty()) return; value = value.Trim(); // still getting a possible null deference And then removed the function c...
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