Big details

I spent three hours trying to fix something in a personal project. Three hours may not seem like a lot of time to some people. It’s an eternity for someone with two younger kids. I spent that eternity on what seems like a tiny issue. The cursor size in my writing app pissed me off—a lot. I got hung up on this detail because it wasn’t a detail. My app is very simple. How simple? The only thing on the screen is a cursor. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about a cursor. But there it was, pissing me off. And that’s because “little” doesn’t exist on its own. “Little” depends on “big”. A needle is little in a haystack. Not as much in a pincushion. The little cursor was now big. Sweating the details is harder than ever The one truism of working in software is there’s never enough time. There’s a constant fight for finite attention. Little things don’t fare well in that fight. Attention gets thrown at adding new things—as it does. The littler things get littlerer. It’s your…