IT concepts that help/helped you in the "real" world.

Question

Which IT concept (e.g. programming) you implement successfully outside the IT world?

For example,

• normalizing databases are relevant to organizing my items.
• Understanding the real scale of information and search engine forces my to stop accumulating data (books, articles, pictures) and improve the method by which I find relevant information.
• deciding when to write a script to do repetitive task --> deciding when i spend to much time on processing my salads manually...

I know that after all, programming is a reflection of the real world. But some concepts were not tackled until computers did everything 10000000 time faster and bigger.

Answer 1

Premature optimization is just as bad in real life as it is in code.

Answer 2

Never trust the one paragraph summary of a product :-)

Seriously, I think fact finding techniques, and general beta (exact) attitude helped a great deal in daily life.

Answer 3

No one knows how anything really works except mathematicians and autistic teenagers.

Answer 4

Since I'm a programmer, I am also the help desk of my family and friends. Sometimes I get presents for fixing their problems...

Answer 5

People's expired or plain wrong comments can mislead you in real life just as they mislead you when trying to understand legacy code.

Answer 6

Real life facts and events "commenting" and recursive activities:-)

Answer 7

Care about what you are doing and really understand what is going on at all levels, as much as possible.

Answer 8

(1) You can never do just one thing.

There are always side effects. You can't anticipate all of them, but you'll have to deal with them anyway. The upside is that some of them will be entertaining.

(2) If you touched it, it owns you.

Whatever it is -- hardware, software, the TV, the car -- any problems with it are the responsibility of the last person who touched it.

(3) Clean up as you go along.

Comment as you code, record checks as you write them, etc. If you wait until it piles up, you will lose track of some of it.

(4) If you're not scared shitless at least half the time, you're not doing it right.

-Al.