Yesterday evening I stayed up late trying to fix a bug in my computer program. I had a general idea what was causing it, but try as I might, I couldn’t track it down. This went on for several hours.<\/p>\n
I didn’t feel like going to sleep without having done anything useful. So just before I retired, I put in a little kludge — a completely hacked work-around — so that the bug wouldn’t show up.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a solution, and the bug was still lurking somewhere in the code, but my kludge was making sure the bug wouldn’t produce any symptoms.<\/p>\n
When I woke up this morning, I realized that if I knew enough to make the kludge work, then I knew enough to solve the underlying problem. I went back and made a small change, and sure enough, the first thing I tried was successful. I had fixed the bug!<\/p>\n
What I then realized was that the very fact that I had known enough to create my kludge meant that somewhere, in the back of my mind, I already knew what the problem was. The knowledge just hadn’t yet percolated to the front of my brain.<\/p>\n
The take-away lesson seems to be this: If you can’t figure out the solution to a problem, it’s ok to create a temporary fix. Your kludged up patch does not need to be elegant. It just needs to work.<\/p>\n
The very fact that you have gotten this far means that your mind is on its way to the real solution. The kludge is your bridge to get there.<\/p>\n
Getting something working, even if via the “wrong” solution, may be just the hint you need to get you the rest of the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday evening I stayed up late trying to fix a bug in my computer program. I had a general idea what was causing it, but try as I might, I couldn’t track it down. This went on for several hours. I didn’t feel like going to sleep without having done anything useful. So just before … Continue reading “Kludge bridging”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14976,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14975\/revisions\/14976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}