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death by 80/20 rule

Editor's Note: this was written at 2AM after some particularly frustrating work on this site and maybe a drink? ...I don't remember. This won't be representative of the quality of blog post I'm going to shoot for here, but I'm leaving it because it's a little funny. I've also edited some of the contents for clarity.

holy shit it took me soooooo long to make a picture frame border around the pizza on this site’s brand new pizza page.

I just did a career development workshop kinda thing for DevLUp FSU and had to explain the 80/20 rule to people concerning website and portfolio development - with 20% percent of the time invested, you’ll get 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of the work will be spent on 20% of the result, polishing up the difficult or important bits. An example I gave was a movement controller from a game jam game we just discussed in that meeting, where everything worked nearly immediately except the player rotating to face the direction of movement, and that work which resulted in only one line of actual code took up roughly 80% of the time we spent on the movement.

The advice was, prioritize what will actually help you, don’t waste time on those 20% details if there’s more effective work to be done - if nebulous and hard detail work needs to be done on either your portfolio or your presentation of your portfolio, put that work into the portfolio itself, where your work will be better appreciated and more relevant.

So, the next day, thinking about websites and stuff because of the workshop, I decide to throw my own site a bone late at night, and I pitch some page ideas to my girlfriend over the phone. The one she picks is the pizza page. A page where I have picture of my most recent pizza. You know, for a laugh. Awesome. Simple. Easy, right?

It took maybe 2 minutes to write “Hello blah blah pizza page” and put a picture of a pizza. Done. Great. Send it.

But, I wanted to put a fancy golden picture frame around the pizza. I thought it would be funny, hilarious, superb, even quaint, if you will.

I spent the last three hours putting a picture frame around the pizza.

Breakdown

No, screw you pizza picture frame, you don’t get to be dignified with a breakdown on how you work because you’re stupid and it’s 2:30 in the morning. I cannot reconcile how simple you are and how long you took me. 1

Whatever, enjoy your pizza, I’m outta here.

p.s. are all of these going to have styling this bad and be this hard to read? let me know in the comments what your predictions are.

  1. (added later for those curious) it’s just a borderimg. I spent most of the time trying to put two images on top of each other so I could just change out the pizza image and not have to photoshop on a new frame each time until I learned it was easier to do it with a border, and when I got that working it took another bit to get it working on safari. I honestly have no clue why it took so long. ↩