I learned SO much about windows during the 2 weeks when my mouse was broken and I was too cheap to replace it. Turns out you can do pretty much anything without the mouse, even without turning on handicapped assistive mode!
And there was a time when a snotty admin convinced me that he had the authority to require me to do development in vim. He did not, and damn that learning curve was steep- but I picked up skills that still serve me well a couple decades later.
Oh, and another one - we had a process for cranking out custom reports, where if you could express the entire thing they were asking for in SQL, then you were done. But if any part of required programming logic, you had to create a controller, and a template file, and register them, and do a full product release... it was a big hassle. And man did I ever learn how to make SQL jump through hoops at that job.
So, a corollary to your "The longest way is the shortest way" is my life lesson - Constraints make you better.
I like that. A constraint means you have at least a starting point too. I've always struggled to keep on track when faced with seemingly infinite options. The first few decisions/constraints that define a project and allow it to be worked on can take a long time.
I really wonder if that admin was more of a 'bastard operator from hell' (old school reference) or sneakily getting you to improve yourself.
> I really wonder if that admin was more of a 'bastard operator from hell'
Ha, yes, he absolutely was. Just very lazy, knew I already had SSH access to our staging server, and knew I needed to develop on there, but didn't want to bother setting up SSHFS and configuring it to be accessible from my windows machine, and didn't want me telling him to do a new staging deploy every 10 minutes while I tried to figure out how to get some connected hardware working right.
And there was a time when a snotty admin convinced me that he had the authority to require me to do development in vim. He did not, and damn that learning curve was steep- but I picked up skills that still serve me well a couple decades later.
Oh, and another one - we had a process for cranking out custom reports, where if you could express the entire thing they were asking for in SQL, then you were done. But if any part of required programming logic, you had to create a controller, and a template file, and register them, and do a full product release... it was a big hassle. And man did I ever learn how to make SQL jump through hoops at that job.
So, a corollary to your "The longest way is the shortest way" is my life lesson - Constraints make you better.