Welcome to Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots — a weblog about development, business, design and technology — written by thoughtbot.

Only Solve Hard Problems When You Have To

When you have the option of doing something in a complicated backwards way or a really straightforward simple way – choose the simple way. This sounds really obvious, but consistently doesn’t happen. In the same way that you should rise above the internal constraints of organizations, you can rise above the desire to do simple things in complicated ways.

Sometimes a CMS just needs to edit pages – and that’s all. Maybe it doesn’t need a revision history that tracks everything anyone’s ever done to a piece of content. And even if it does, maybe you can do that in a really non-rocket-science sort of way.

The key is to solve the problem you’re solving – not the imaginary-but-complex problem that you might want to be solving.

About this entry

You're reading an entry on GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS, the company weblog of thoughtbot, inc.

Author:
Matt Jankowski
Published:
December 6th 12:00 PM
Updated:
December 6th 10:56 PM
Sections:
Business

 

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What are we up to?

We built Shoulda, an eclectic set of additions to Test::Unit; Paperclip to manage uploaded files without hassle; Jester, a REST/ActiveResource client library written in Javascript, and Squirrel, an enhancement for ActiveRecord's find syntax; — amongst some other projects.


Chad (President) and Jon (CTO) co-authored a technical book titled Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails, which explores the ins and outs of the ActiveRecord ruby library. You can buy it today at Amazon.com.

About thoughtbot, inc.

We are a small web application development consulting business, with offices in Boston, MA and New York, NY. If you're looking to find a team for your next web development project or your new web application — get in touch.