Tooling yourself to death

Erik McClure has written a simply amazing summation of the mindset and approach that goes into something I myself continuously suffer from but am getting better and better at avoiding; tooling yourself to death. We don't do this because we don't see the bigger picture. We do it because we have a really huge, very detailed picture of what we want and we know that so many things are wrong with the status quo that to reach the end goal, we'll need to solve a wide host of problems. Being programmers, we know empirically to build a foundation first, not realising that problems will pop up as we actually near that grandiose goal. At best, this renders the theoretical foundation — our tools — useless as time goes on. The most absurd part of it all is that when we don't remember how wrong this approach actually is, our guts tell us that it makes so much sense:

Despite this, I press onward with relentless enthusiasm, driven by a strange force of hope in the face of overwhelming evidence that I have absolutely no fucking idea what I'm doing and am clearly destined to fail miserably.

It took me until a year ago to start realising what now seems so obvious; great tools are defined by and come from process — not the other way around, however many theoretical problems they seem to initially solve.