When nothing is left to take away

[ewx]

My work consists of various parts: design, coding, bug-fixing, release management, and other things. This is true of my hobby software development too, though the proportions differ.

Bug fixing can take up a significant chunk of the implementation of a project, perhaps around half of the most recent release, for instance. Quite often the cause of a bug is obvious but sometimes a potentially lengthy investigation is required. Sometimes this is amounts to a steady growth of understanding but from time to time it involves a sudden insight into the problem. I've occasionally referred to this as 'bug satori'. The fix might not follow quickly from the insight, but knowing what the fix will look like is usually fairly easy afterwards.

A design exercise, for something heavy in data structures or algorithms, can produce another kind of experience: at some point I often find that, after making one key change in one place, everything else starts to rapidly fall into place. It feels like the complexity just collapses into a simpler system. Past experience shows that this is usually fairly late in the design (which means I've started seeing the light at the end of a particular tunnel). Unlike bug satori however I don't have a good name for this experience. Anyone got any suggestions?