Mentally Sweating

Odd how things occur, sometimes, just as planned. Right after I got done reading the following post on being mentally lazy, a perfect example happened right before my eyes.

A co-worker of mine, we’ll call him Stan, was working on a production defect. Of course he has BA’s, application support and management all breathing down his back while he tries to correct this defect. Sure, solving it and moving on is what everyone wants to do but understanding the issue, making the correction and moving on is an entirely different experience.

One of the things we pinpointed as causing the issue was the viewstate hidden input tag that ASP.Net loves to use and abuse. It seemed extremely large. Whether this was the correct issue to pinpoint is for another post but what caught me was what Stan thought would be a viable solution. He suggested using some sort of Http compression to compress the response back to the client. This would shrink the viewstate and everyone would be happy. The words from the Intellectual Laziness rang in my head and I expressed my concerns to Stan that yes compression might solve the issue but that would be truly treating the symptom and not the root cause. I suggested, he should be maybe investigate why the viewstate was so big and find out how to control it.

Now, I’m not poking fun at Stan or trying to make myself look good. Instead, I am coming to the realization of just how easy it is to be mentally lazy. Humans were born with the instinct to be lazy, both physically and mentally.

This post certainly reminds me to take a second look and never be scared to learn something new. Never be scared to work up a good mental lather.