Today I spent a couple of valuable hours trying to setup a project and directory structure for executing a bioinformatics program which I did not end up using. Why? It turns out that the program already did a good enough organization of the results that all you had to do was to simply dump the input filepaths.
I attribute this to two things:
- Not spending enough time on documentation of the program
- Hurrying to write solutions knowing that I could do it
The second problem is a more menacing one. The fact that I knew I could do it biased me more in favor of overlooking the first problem and re-inventing the wheel.
Lesson learned: Pause and read documentation. Do not let the allure of "re-invention" fool you. Sometimes, patience is a virtue not a vice.