Do your research and fail early!

I have been happily working on this project, part of the fun is figuring out what you’re going to name the project; I considered many metaphors to clearly illustrate the system, finally landing on MetricBeat. Other metaphors were regarding plants or music.

One day, a coworker that has been following along this project and giving me great input, casually said: “Have you seen that Elastic has a product called Metricbeat?” I immediately went to Elastic’s Beats Family page, and lo and behold:

The beats family from Elastic

From that moment I realized two things: I have to do better research before starting on something, and I have to write an article about this.

Research first

Had I done proper research before naming everything MetricBeat, I would have found Elastic’s product and would have looked for a new metaphor for this project. Here’s what I looked like after deciding on the name:

Old meme to name all the things "MetricBeat"

As you can see, the excitement got the best of me.

A mistake caught early is many times easier to fix than one caught late

There is a saying: Fail early, fail often. The first part means that the sooner you fail the easier it is to fix the mistake; the second part is to allow yourself to learn from your mistakes. In this case, I failed late because I already started coding! While coding the names I used for variables and classes are centered around “beats”. 

So, new tasks have been added to the board now: Find new name, Research the new name, Rename code repositories and Refactor code. Each of these tasks has a higher priority than anything else; I don’t want to continue adding new functionality before correcting the course.


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