Work smarter, not harder... and faster!

Maybe it's obvious. When you try to do things really fast, it can actually be slower.

I always thought "A stitch in time saves nine" meant that you should stitch as fast as possible. I think I just assumed that, which I need to be careful of, because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

It's certainly true with programming. When it comes down to it, if you look at a finished application, it's conceivable you could just type the code for it in an afternoon, especially if you have good tools that let you express your intent quickly. Of course, you don't know exactly what the code will look like until you start to create it, but let's ignore that for a sec.

So... taking my time and thinking for a second to save time. I was too frantic for the last couple years, and wrote a lot of Log object instantiations.

public static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(NiceObject.class);

I wrote that a lot, and got a Das Keyboard so I could type it even faster. I knew that Eclipse could do this for me, but there's that nagging startup cost, where the first time I set it up, it would take longer, and I might go looking around for more of the same (or blog about it), making it much longer than typing it out.

Well, lo and behold, I am happy I took the 30 seconds to: