I’ve found this saying to be particularly true these last couple of weeks. Having passed my confirmation viva I wanted to spend a bit of time cleaning up my code that has got rather bloated with all the recent additions to it. Since I’ve never been formally taught OO programming I decided to brush up on this as well. I bought the “Gang of Four” classic Design Patterns book and decided to implement as much as I could of it in my program. However, after about a week I was getting more and more distracted by the small details that I’d forgotten about the bigger picture, my actual research. Rather than trying to tweak tiny insignificant details that won’t really matter as my code is just for me (for the time being) I should be looking at what I’m using it for.
So as advice for anyone writing software for research, get it working first. Get it working in an organised fashion second, then you can worry about optimising it for performance. Try not to worry about making it as perfect as can be as it will only change a few months down the line!