A metaphor I figured this weekend whilst trying to dump a large container of rainwater… Storytime: This container was filled with mosquito larvae, and I’m not about to have mosquitos mess up the warm months, so I had to dump it! But in order to dump it, I’d have to carry this large container of dirty water over to the plants/flowers that needed the water, but it’s like a back-breakingly heavy amount of water! Not only heavy due to all the water, but the water was full of bugs and dirt sloshing around. And there was a bunch of hose in the way! Not flat terrain. Just then, in an amazing turn-around, I picked up a soup-sized container (actually a to-go container of Canh Chua), and realized that I could take smaller volumes of water from the large container, and send to the plants/flowers where it needed to be.

Through this process, I EASILY transported half the total volume of water, then with the other half, I was able to pick up and dump the whole thing–Rainwater is very good for plants–but more importantly, the tie-in, that a gargantuan task can be unfeasible to do all at once, but achievable by applying the small-piece-at-a-time philosophy, the chipping away model. And once most of it was done, the rest of it was easy! There was a tipping point; it wasn’t necessary to chip away the whole monolith. Applicable to coding more complex things, and other non-coding accomplishments, surely.

Didn’t take any pictures, but I made AI generate an image of the scene, which I used for the featured image. Not bad!