Keep It Simple Silly

For some reason, our brains love complicated things.

Even if there's a straightforward solution right in front of us which gets the job done, it doesn't feel adequate. It feels too simple.

While this trait is handy sometimes and pushes us to add more depth and thoughts to our craft, it can sometimes be overkill.

For example, I've been using a mix of CMS, like Ghost or WordPress and static site generators like Gatsby or Eleventy to power my blogs over the years.

And one of the quirks of the static-site route is writing the blog post details in a specific format known as the frontmatter.

Writing frontmatter is repetitive and could be automated or at least morphed into a template.

At first, I thought I could build a webpage where I would write my blog post and add the post description, and it would generate a markdown file ready to be published as a blog post.

But, this would take an unjustified amount of effort and time that I didn't want to invest in this little quality of life improvement.

The next option was to build a plugin for my text editor, which would help me generate the blog post frontmatter in a few clicks.

This, again, required even more effort than my previous solution.

And then it clicked. I had been seeing this problem from the wrong perspective.

The text editor I was using allows me to create live templates which could generate blocks of text with dynamic elements such as today's date, name of the file and more.

So, that is what I did. I created a template which automatically turns the blog post file name into a frontmatter containing today's date, the file name transformed into a neat title and an empty description field every time I write fm and press Tab.

It's a simple solution that gets the job done, and it took me only ten minutes to build.

Wildly, my mind didn't focus on this solution because it likes to overcomplicate stuff.

And I've seen this trait at work, too, where people unnecessarily overengineer their code, which then makes it hard for others to comprehend.

Try this approach the next time you feel like you're overcomplicating things.

Imagine what could be the simplest and lowest-effort solution that could get the job done to an acceptable level.

The simplest solutions are often the best ones.