My Practice on “A Head of Time”
So, everyone’s always buzzing about being “a head of time,” right? Like it’s some magic key. We had this one project, a pretty straightforward web app, nothing too crazy. But someone, let’s just call him “Big Ideas Bob,” got this notion that we needed to be “a head of time” with our performance. Way, way ahead.
Before we even had the core features nailed down, Bob was pushing for all sorts of complex caching layers, pre-rendering stuff that barely existed, and optimizing database queries for scenarios we hadn’t even dreamed up yet. “We’re getting ahead of the curve!” he’d say. We spent weeks, man, weeks, wrestling with this “ahead of time” architecture. The actual feature development? Slowed to a crawl. We were building this super-optimized engine for a car that didn’t even have wheels yet.
I remember one specific instance. We were working on a simple user profile page. Basic stuff: name, email, a list of their recent activity. Bob insisted we pre-calculate and cache every possible view of this activity list, for every user, updated in real-time. “Think of the speed! Users will love it!” The complexity it added was insane. We had background jobs running, complex invalidation logic, and the database was getting hammered with updates for data that maybe, just maybe, one user out of a thousand would look at in that specific pre-calculated way that week.
- We argued. Oh, we argued.
- We showed him data that users mostly just looked at their top 5 recent items.
- He’d just wave his hand and say, “But we’re being proactive! We’re ahead of time!”
Then came the first big feature change request. Management wanted to add a new type of user interaction to the activity feed. Suddenly, all our “ahead of time” pre-calculated caches were wrong. Not just wrong, but a massive pain to update. The logic was so tangled, so built on assumptions about the old system, that unraveling it and re-doing it took longer than building the new feature from scratch would have. We were stuck. Our “ahead of time” strategy had painted us into a corner. We were actually behind because of all the time we spent trying to be ahead.
How did I really learn this lesson, though?
It wasn’t just that one project with Bob, though that was a big eye-opener. It was seeing this pattern repeat. I once worked at this other place, a small startup. We were building a mobile app. The lead developer was obsessed with using the absolute newest, bleeding-edge framework. “This is the future! We’re getting in ahead of time!” he’d proclaim. Sound familiar?
Well, this framework was so new, it was barely documented. The community support? Non-existent. Every tiny bug we hit, every weird behavior, we were on our own. We spent more time fighting the framework than building our app. We were “ahead of time” with the tech, alright, but we were also “ahead of time” for any stability or decent tooling. We burned through so much time and energy. Other teams, using boring, stable tech, were shipping features left and right. We were still trying to figure out why a button wouldn’t render correctly after the framework’s latest “alpha” update.
Eventually, that startup ran out of runway. Not solely because of the tech choice, of course, but that constant struggle, that drain on resources trying to be “a head of time” with an unproven tool, it definitely didn’t help. We were so focused on being “ahead” that we forgot to just build something solid and deliver it on time. It was a hard knock, that one. Made me realize that sometimes, “just in time” or even “a little bit behind the bleeding edge” is a much smarter place to be, especially when you actually need to get stuff done.
So now, when I hear someone get all starry-eyed about being “a head of time” with some unproven, complex solution before the basics are even solid, I get a little twitchy. I’ve seen where that road can lead. It’s often a detour, not a shortcut.
