Okay, so I was looking at this old piece of code I had, right? Just a little script I wrote ages ago to help me with some daily task. Nothing fancy. And I thought, you know, I should probably clean this up a bit. It’s been bugging me.
I sat down, had a look. Made a quick list in my head. “Okay, probably around 39 things to sort out,” I told myself. You know, rename some variables, maybe make a couple of functions a bit clearer, add some comments. Standard stuff. Shouldn’t take too long, famous last words.
So I dived in. Started with the first thing on my mental list. Easy peasy. Then I moved to the second. And as I was fixing that, I noticed something else. “Oh, might as well fix that too while I’m here,” I thought. And then that little fix showed me another tiny thing that could be better.
You see where this is going, right?
It was like pulling a thread on an old sweater. What started as 39 specific, identifiable items just… well, it snowballed. I’d fix one thing, and it would shine a light on two more. I’d refactor a small function, and suddenly I’d see how I could improve the logic in three other places that depended on it. It wasn’t even like I was looking for extra work. It just sort of… appeared.
The “Uh Oh” Moment
After a few evenings of this, I kind of lost track of my original “39”. I was just in the zone, tweaking and polishing. Then, one night, I leaned back and thought, “How much did I actually change here?” So, just for kicks, I started going through my commit history and my own mental notes. I tried to count all the little distinct changes, the refactors, the rethinks.
And guess what? I ended up with a number closer to eighty. Yeah, 80. From an initial, very confident “39.” Eighty distinct little improvements, fixes, and cleanups. It was wild. Eighty things done when I only set out to do thirty-nine.
My first thought was, “Man, I am terrible at estimating.” And yeah, probably true for these kinds of rabbit-hole projects. But then I thought more about it. Was it a bad thing? I didn’t have to do all that. This was my own little script, no boss breathing down my neck, no deadline.
- I made it way more robust than I planned.
- It actually ran a bit faster, surprisingly.
- And honestly, I understood my own old code so much better afterwards.
So, this “80 of 39” situation, it wasn’t really scope creep in the bad, project-delaying corporate sense. It was more like… scope discovery? Or maybe just getting carried away because, for once, I could. I had the time, and I was genuinely finding it kinda satisfying to polish that old thing until it shined.
It’s funny how that happens with personal projects. You start with a small goal, and then you just follow your curiosity. Sometimes it leads to a messy detour, sure. But other times, like with this script, you end up with something much better than you originally envisioned, even if it means you did 80 things when you only planned for 39.
So yeah, that was my little adventure. It taught me that sometimes, letting the work guide you, especially on your own stuff, can be pretty rewarding. Even if your estimates are hilariously off. It’s all part of the process, I guess. Just gotta embrace the chaos sometimes.