Thou with hammer, whack

Suppose that you’ve just acquired some hard-fought knowledge or skill. Maybe you’ve made tweaks to a particularly cringeworthy area of your codebase, or finally figured out how to hook up a profiler to the system that you use to run unit tests. Anyhow, you’re done and ready to move on. Right?

/shrug

Chances are if you had to fight hard to get this far, most other people turned around a while ago. And if that’s the case, you’ll look really good if you whack a few easy to spot nails with your shiny new hammer that no one else has any idea how to use.

Practically, this could mean a few things:

• If you just figured out a swamp of your codebase, clean up the unit tests for it (if they exist and are nasty) or write some new ones (if they don’t).
• If you had to learn how to do some performance profiling to speed up your code path, try profiling some other really important code paths in your project. There’s a good chance that if you had to try really hard to write performant code, some dolt messed it up elsewhere.

It may not be worth following the white rabbit for days, but a few hours? Almost certainly.