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Most procedurally generated roguelikes have a concept of ascending difficulty levels designed to test the mettle of players who have wasted the most time mastering the nuances of the game. (Lest you think I speak in disparagement, I have cleared A20 for every character in Slay the Spire.)

Some of these difficulty modifiers operate by adding things you have to contend with, but the more interesting ones are subtractive. They take away tools from your tool belt, forcing you to be more resourceful with what remains.

It is in that spirit that I suggest a few exercises to get yourself out of muscle memory.

  1. Go an entire day without looking up any data in any vendor's interface.

  2. Institute a rule that all changes to the codebase must be net negative over a certain horizon. To land a PR that adds 400 lines of code, you must first separately remove 400 lines of code. I say separately because it is probably bad git hygiene to have the two commingled, unless they happen to be touching the same code path.

  3. For an entire week, you are not allowed to answer any support ticket with any information that isn't publicly accessible within the docs.

  4. Inspired by Netflix's Chaos Monkey, build and run a script that turns off one of your third-party dependencies and returns 500s.

  5. For an entire week, enable network throttling in your browser of choice.

  6. Go through your primary activation flows on your phone with adaptive text cranked to its largest setting.

  7. Grab ten users who have churned more than three months ago out of a hat and email them, all lowercase, with the subject: "howdy — anything we can do to win back your business?"

  8. Go an entire week without logging in as a given user. If you're trying to replicate some tricky bit of state, you are only allowed to pull what you think is the relevant data pertaining to them from the production database.

  9. Delete five third-party dependencies, open source or otherwise, by the end of the week.

  10. Do that one thing that you've been putting off — you know what it is — before doing anything else.


About the Author

I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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