Restart

Sometimes – and I hope for your sake that that time is early in the development process – you need to throw the things you have out entirely and start fresh. A blank slate, as I have stated before, is the easiest starting point. If you believe that your application is beyond saving and that no insight or use can be salvaged from it, then you can build your application from scratch.

A lot of the time, it doesn’t make sense to migrate components between old and new applications either because of stack incompatibility or because the old components offer nothing of value. In these cases, the most valuable thing is the data generated by the old application and migrating that data to a database that can interact with the new application.

If you’re making a new application, honestly, do it your way. But here’s some advice:

• Make decisions that are long term and not just based on what you’re thinking about now.
• Make decisions that put quality first, but also understand that mistakes will always be there.
• Don’t react to everything; being reactive will 100% result in a worse application. If you can help it, don’t react to anything. Be proactive.
• Put quality, readability, and maintainability first. Don’t think that you’ll come back to something later. That kind of thinking adds many hours of work on your shoulders (or even worse, somebody else’s) later.

Restarting an application and building it from scratch is an appealing concept. Don’t restart too much, though, because you’ll never get anything done. There are only so many times you can restart a project before you realize that maybe your approach is the problem.

Summary

This chapter took a few detours that you may have not seen coming. It was a chapter about simplicity, finding better ways to get your work done, and optimizing the use of your resources to get that work done.

You learned how to deliver content to your users faster and in a more customized way while at the same time collecting their data for analytical insights. You also learned the methods and formats of this data collection process, as well as the important role that Python can play in processing this data.

You also learned about applications, how most application waste is created, and how this can bog down your workload and your successors for years to come. You also learned a few ways to either mitigate, get around, or eliminate this problem.

So, in conclusion, you have now figured out that manipulating resources is about being efficient not just for the resources, but for the sake of your own time. I hope that you reflect on this chapter for your DevOps workloads and your grocery shopping.

In the next chapter, we are going to cover a particularly favorite topic of mine: automation. We are going to find ways we can make our lives easier and less bothered by things we shouldn’t be bothered with.