Brute logic

There may be a risk to pursuing elegance too much: you can learn to ignore solutions that, while straightforward, are not particularly interesting. I recently added a feature I'd wanted for years to a program I maintain. The implementation didn't require any clever insights, or fall naturally out of the right view of the problem, nor was there anything particularly ugly about it. It was just ten or so lines of unexciting logic, with no surprises and no cleverness. So even though I knew this feature would be handy, I put it off because I didn't see a good way to do it. But it didn't require a good way; the obvious one was fine. If I were less hung up on elegance, I'd have written it years ago.

This is not the first time I've had this problem. To ignore anything that's not beautiful or interesting may be a good guide for hard problems, but for easy ones it's paralysing. Sometimes you just have to write the code.