I’ve been contemplating a phrase for a few days now. It applies to writing code, as I do for a living, as well as a whole host of other things… from relationships, to home life, life goals and endeavors… the list goes on.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of progress.

I know what some people are immediately going to think when they read that. You’re asking me to settle for less than the best, Aaron? Let me say, emphatically, no. In fact, settling is the opposite of what I’m suggesting.

You may have heard of the Lean Startup concept of building a new business or product. I’ve talked about it before. The basic idea is you don’t wait to be feature perfect… you build, iterate, gather feedback, iterate on that feedback and continue the process. That philosophy hedges your bets around building something nobody wants by not waiting for the final, polished product before launching into the world. It relies on the concept that you don’t have to have something perfect in order to release into the wild.

Too often when making engineering decisions in a product, the risk is that you will want to make sure everything is perfect right now. Make sure the classes are all structured perfectly. Perfect object oriented methodologies are in place. Every edge case considered. An entire code-base unit tested.

All of these are extremely important, but they are also things that can be iterated on. Sometimes you can’t write code that relies on code you haven’t yet written yet! So you write shitty code that does the job in order to get ahead, and then return to that shitty code to refactor later.

Sometimes in your personal life, you may find yourself in a relationship that doesn’t have all the ideology of “The One” (Note: What the fuck does “The One” even mean?). That person is perfect in every way. They get your hearts. Understand your twitches. Empathize and support you through all your difficulties and struggles. Yet there’s just a couple things you just can’t stand. Do you give up and move on to the next, expecting next time that you’ll find perfection? Or do you buckle down and realize what you have is pretty damn good and it will be even better than that later on?

Do you let perfection get in the way of progress?

You shouldn’t. You should release, iterate, get feedback and release again. In code. In life.