KaraokeException("Pythonista Party Error")

Hey there,

When I went to college to get my computer science degree some of my friends were really into "UltraStar Deluxe", an open-source karaoke game based on the PlayStation game "Singstar."

If you've never played UltraStar or any other karaoke game, here's how it works: 

You take turns singing along to a bunch of pop songs and the game grades you on your accuracy—how closely you matched the pitch and the rhythm of the original song, and so on.

At first I didn't really understand why my friend Dmitriy—pretty much the sharpest theoretical computer scientists I know—was so keen on inviting us all to his apartment so we could spend the evening karaoke-ing with him... 

It just...didn't really seem to fit the impression I had of him. But, I was ready to be surprised, and so I went to the party. 

Now, I didn't want to make a complete ass of myself, so while riding the train to Dmitriy's house I kept thinking about my strategy:

To beat my friends at this karaoke contest, the goal was to imitate the original song as closely as possible—to make it sound smooth and nice. Or at least that's what I thought.

Anyway, I'm at this party now and we're all taking turns karaoke-ing these crappy Europop songs—

And seeing that we're all a bunch of undergrad CS students, you can imagine the "fidelity" of these performances... Let's just say I was certainly NOT going to be nominated for a Grammy anytime soon!

So there we are, croning our way through some truly terrific music ("Aqua" anyone?) until—finally!—it is Dmitriy's turn...

You know, the whole time I'd been wondering WHY the guy was so keen on hosting this karaoke party, and so I was curious as to what would happen next... And he didn't let me down:

The speakers started blaring the first bars of "Sweet Child O' Mine"—and then Dmitriy breaks into action! But all I'm hearing is this high-pitched imitation of a whale, "eeeeeeEEEEeeeeee!!" So what's happening?!

Imagine this 6-foot, bearded Ukranian computer science student with an intense look in his eyes, focused on the TV and making these high-pitched screeching noises! It sounds like a whale pod high on acid!

But here's the thing—he's NAILING the song! His score keeps on going up and up and up! One by one he's blasting all of us of the water!

You see, the guy is a true genius, and he's found a loophole to get a perfect score on any song: 

By making this ear-pinching "eeeeeeeee!!" noise the game has trouble analyzing his "singing," and it gives him a perfect score... Needless to say, Dmitriy got a real kick out of demonstrating this technique to us.

There was a lot more "eeeEEEee-ing" that night, but not once have I managed to beat Dmitriy's high score in UltraStar—

However, I feel like I learned a valuable lesson in those hours that I've been applying ever since to my programming work: 

You always got to ask yourself, "What's the real goal here?"

Are you here to sing a beautiful song—or to WIN the game with a "crazy", but effective, shortcut that no-one else has thought of?

In a complex field like programming I constantly find opportunities to take shortcuts that are not "perfect" but get the job done, with few downsides.

For example, I've been working on a Django-based content management system for a website. 

All of the content on the site is written in a plaintext Markdown files that then gets rendered out to HTML. 

Sometimes we need to embed reusable pieces of content and other widgets on the pages. And so I spent two days building out an extensible "macro" system that allows me to insert custom tags for referencing external content inside these files...

Well, you know, I woke up on the third day and slapped my forehead: 

I realized that what I'm building is a templating system...and Django already has a perfectly viable templating system built-in! 

So I went and threw out all of my home-grown macro code and replaced it with a few lines of logic to run the whole shebang through Django's template compiler.

Problem solved! 

And this solution is a lot more robust and maintainable than what I had cooked up over the previous 48 hours. (And no whales whatsoever where hurt in the making of it.)

Always ask yourself this: 

Is there a coding problem you're working on right now where you can "win" with a creative shortcut that makes your life a lot easier? 

Maybe you should take it!

— Dan Bader