Are Programmers Lazy? 🧐
23 May 2021
Programmers often say they’re lazy. They say this meaning that they would rather invent (or discover) a solution that cuts out grunt work than do the same tasks over and over.
I think there’s a clearer way to frame it. Good programmers are lazy with respect to grunt work, but marked by diligence when it comes to the mental work of refactoring and eliminating redundancy.
That said, there is some wisdom in championing the traditional “programmers are lazy” trope. It incentivizes mental work by highlighting that mental work can save you from grunt work.
So, after all that, I guess I’m refactoring my site’s project section because I’m lazy.
After updating this section with a few projects, I’ve been struck with how fragile the process of hard-coding each new project in HTML. What if I forget to update one of the links? What if I ruin the section by mixing up the container hierarchy?
I’ve been trying to think of a solution to simply feed data to… something… and have it render each project. I would already know how to do this if my site were using React. I could build this with vanilla JavaScript by iterating over an array of project data and appending each project card to the project section.
Or I could be even lazier and look for a pre-built solution in Jekyll. There’s gotta be something, right?
Yup! This article in the Jekyll documentation shows how to iterate over YAML, JSON, or CSV data files via Liquid. Now I can “avoid copy-pasting large chunks of code in [my] Jekyll [template].” (You read my mind, Jekyll Docs.) After scanning some Liquid documentation I figured out how to sort it, too.
Cheers to (not?) being lazy.🥂