In my final year of university, I took an advanced programming languages course where we learned by designing a language from scratch in OCaml.
When we got to recursion, we inevitably ran into the classic example: factorial. Our professor gave us an optional, no-credit exercise—to use our “new” programming language to define a function f(n) that returned n! for n < 10. The limit was small because the exercise wasn’t really about handling large integers.
It was challenging, but doable. What stuck with me, though, was how the professor approached it when we discussed the exercise in the next class.
Instead of working out a complicated recursive definition for f, he pointed out that we could simply hard-code every answer up to 10.
Simple and straightforward. Was it cheating? Maybe. Did it solve the problem? Yes.
To be honest, I spent much of university—and even the beginning of my first job—trying to find the “best” solution before doing anything else. I probably wasted a fair amount of time overthinking problems and making them more complicated than they needed to be.
Sometimes there is a best solution. Other times, a solution that works is good enough.
I remember working with a senior developer on a project with a tight deadline. We still had a bug that the customer might notice, and I was trying to find the perfect way to fix it. The senior developer suggested that we deliver what we had. By the end of the day, we needed to show the customer something. Even if it wasn’t perfect, that was much better than showing up empty-handed.
That same mindset came back to me while I was completing the last four speedrun achievements in Factorio.
I don’t particularly enjoy speedrunning the game, but I love Factorio, so naturally I wanted to unlock every achievement. During a megabase run, I like to plan everything carefully and make every part of the factory clean, efficient, and elegant.
A speedrun is different. The factory doesn’t need to be beautiful. It doesn’t need to scale forever. You just need to get the damn science done, keep everything working long enough, and earn the achievement.
Sometimes the elegant solution is worth pursuing. Sometimes you just need to launch the rocket.
I finished the achievement just before the 2.1 beta was released. I don’t have much hard-earned wisdom to share about the exact process—my final time was 25 hours, 7 minutes, and 49 seconds, so it wasn’t exactly a white-knuckle run. As long as I knew what I needed to do next and kept the same “good enough” mindset, there was plenty of breathing room. I had a collection of blueprints ready, which saved me from designing everything from scratch. They didn’t form one beautiful, perfectly organized factory, but they didn’t have to. They only had to get me across the finish line.
I’ve heard patch 2.1 will add some tougher achievements—and apparently spell the end of the Space Casino. R.I.P. For now, I’m taking a break until the update is officially released.