Into the rabbit hole

Ola Sendecka @asendecka Django Core team Django Girls co-founder

slides - https://speakerdeck.com/asendecka/into-the-rabbit-hole

• A story of Alice in Djangoland.
• Using model with BooleanField is_archived and manager with .filter(is_archived=False)
• But found a ModelForm didn’t show the instance she wanted to look at
• Use function to do magic - preserve_existing_choices - insert current value in select
• Hit error page
• Changed to extend ModelChoiceIterator to insert the current value
• Form now displays properly, but form save gives error
• So extend ModelChoiceField and override to_python() method
• Then tried to change select widget to RadioSelect - but that didn’t work.
• Looked at __init__() method - but it’s big and hairy, so didn’t want to mess with it
• So instead use normal ModelChoiceField, and inject her to_python() method
• It worked! But it was ugly, fragile - she felt ashamed
• She’d spent hours, unexpected stuff happened, not good

She’d been in a rabbit hole

• rabbit hole - you get so caught up in a detail, that you spend lots of time buried there, get sidetracked, change direction a lot and end up somewhere unexpected
• you can follow the steps, but lots of confusion and frustration
• some think rabbit holes are good - in flow mode
• but every time I end up in a rabbit hole, I feel frustrated, helpless, angry, stupid
• next time I would do things differently
• to understand the rabbit hole I wanted to read things - I have 2 bits of advice
• ziegarnik effect
  • the tendency to have intrusive thoughts about something started but never finished
  • so even though you want to move on, you keep going back, feel guilty ..
  • expts show that people remember unfinished puzzles much better than solved ones
  • sometimes we’ve invested too much - hard to objectively judge
• sunk cost fallacy
  • you get emotionally invested in the project once you’ve put time into it
  • so you feel you can’t stop - the time spent would be “wasted”
  • so you keep going
  • connected to personal responsibility - so affects person responsible for committing resources
  • so you end up doing unwise things and continuing investing when you should stop

So how did Alice end up in the rabbit hole in the first place

• django was doing lots of magic to make it easy - so she assumed her change would be easy
• concentrated on surface level issue - symptom, not cause
• continues building on previous partial solution, rather than backing out and starting again
• convinced she was very close to a solution
• cannot give up - too proud, wanting to prove - can be ok on side project, but not good in your job, or a big open source project

What to do:

• first notice that you are in a rabbit hole
  • don’t notice when time passes
  • always almost done
  • forget to eat, drink, go to toilet ...
  • when you do step away, you can’t stop thinking about the problem
  • haven’t spoken with anyone for some time
  • feel cranky about any interruptions
• how to get out
  • estimate time for your next task and set timer
  • make a todo list
  • rubber duck - explain your problem to someone/duck/... - write an email to someone
  • take a longer break - and actually stop thinking about the issue!
  • ask for help

What are your stories about rabbit holes? How do you get out of them?

• where can I ask for help on Django?
• good to have colleague, even remotely. Maybe someone else on the internet
• helping others online makes it more likely that others will help you