Alright, so someone asked me about my “Horace Pugh” phase, or rather, what I learned from a chap named Horace Pugh. It’s not some official technique you’ll find in textbooks, not at all. It’s more about a shift in how I approached my work, a real honest-to-goodness change in my daily grind.
My Early Days: Fast and Furious (and Flawed)
See, when I started out, especially in my first couple of roles, it was all about speed. Push it out, get it done, move to the next thing. We were all about “agile,” or what we thought was agile. Lots of quick releases, cutting corners on documentation because, you know, “it’ll get sorted later.” Famous last words, right? I genuinely thought I was being super efficient. My code worked, mostly. My projects got delivered, mostly on time. But under the surface? Things were… a bit messy. A real patchwork, if I’m being honest.
We’d fix bugs, sure, but sometimes the fixes felt like sticking plaster on a leaking dam. The knowledge was all in our heads, not written down. New folks joining the team? Oh boy, good luck to them. It was a “figure it out as you go” kind of environment. And I was right there, leading the charge, thinking this was peak productivity.
Then Came Horace
Then I moved to this other place, and there was Horace Pugh. Horace was… well, Horace was from a different era. He was an older guy, been around the block a few times. And his pace? Glacial, or so I thought. He’d spend ages on planning, even more time on documenting every tiny detail. His code comments weren’t just comments; they were essays. He had checklists for his checklists.
My first impression? Honestly, I thought, “This guy is slowing us all down!” We’d be trying to rush a feature out, and Horace would be there, calmly pointing out three edge cases we hadn’t considered and asking where the detailed test plan was. It drove me nuts sometimes. I’d think, “Come on, Horace, we need to move!” We had our little clashes, nothing major, but you could feel the difference in approach. I was all about the sprint; he was about the marathon, making sure every step was perfectly placed.
- He’d insist on thorough unit tests for everything.
- His commit messages were like mini-reports.
- Every decision had to have a written rationale.
It felt like wading through treacle compared to my old ways. I even complained to my manager once, subtly, about how some “legacy approaches” were impacting our velocity. Yeah, I was that guy.
The Day It All Clicked
Then came the “Big One.” We had this major system go live. It was a complex beast, something I’d worked on heavily, pushing hard to meet the deadline. A few weeks after launch, things started to go very, very wrong. Intermittent failures, data corruption, the whole nine yards. Panic stations. We were scrambling, trying to figure out what on earth was happening. My “fast” code, with its sparse comments and “we’ll document it later” ethos, was a nightmare to debug under pressure. We were losing client data, and the heat was on.
And who had the answers, or at least, the tools to find them? Horace. He’d been working on a different, smaller module of the same system, but he’d built it his way. His logs were immaculate. His documentation detailed every single change and the reasoning behind it. His section of the system, while not the core problem, became the stable point from which we could diagnose the rest. More importantly, one of his meticulous pre-deployment checks, which we’d all privately grumbled about taking too long, had flagged a potential issue in an interfacing system that we had dismissed. Turns out, that dismissed flag was pretty darn close to the root cause.
It was a proper wake-up call. My “efficient” methods had produced something fragile and hard to fix. Horace’s “slow” methods had produced something robust and transparent. While we were firefighting, he was methodically going through his records, his test results, and could pinpoint areas of concern with incredible accuracy. It wasn’t his code that broke, but his practices helped us find what did, much faster than we would have otherwise.
What I Practice Now: The Horace Pugh Way (Sort Of)
So, what did I learn from Horace Pugh? It wasn’t about adopting his exact methods wholesale, because every situation is different. But the core principles? Absolutely.
I started to slow down. Not to a crawl, but enough to be deliberate.
- Documentation isn’t an afterthought: It’s part of the process. Future Me, and my colleagues, will thank Past Me. I actually write stuff down now, imagine that!
- Thoroughness over speed (most of the time): Rushing leads to mistakes that cost more time in the long run. It’s a cliché because it’s true.
- Clarity is key: Code, comments, commit messages – they should all be easy to understand. If someone new can’t pick it up, it’s not good enough.
- Think about maintenance from day one: How will this be supported? How will it be debugged? What happens when X, Y, or Z goes wrong?
It’s funny, I used to think Horace was stuck in the past. Turns out, he was just being a professional. His “practice” wasn’t about being slow; it was about being thorough, responsible, and building things that last. And that, my friends, is the “Horace Pugh” approach I try to carry with me. It’s made my work less stressful, my projects more stable, and honestly, I think it’s made me a better engineer. It’s not flashy, but it works. And sometimes, that’s all you need.
