Curious Observation About Engineering

For a while, I've wanted to develop a small application that I can use to sync my mp3 player with my computer, or vice versa. It tends to be a fairly common thing, as I'm always adding/removing songs from one or the other. It also comes up a lot if I do a new install of an operating system and I'd like to have some music on there temporarily; it's just easier to transfer it from my mp3 player rather than another file system on a hard drive somewhere.

Yesterday, I started thinking about this application again, and today I began fleshing out some things on paper. I was going over things such as how you determine if two files are identical (despite file name, file size, etc... which don't really tell you anything about uniqueness), what sort of sync behavior should be used (mutual-add, mutual-add/delete, etc...), and how to handle the more real-life situation where you've got a number of folders with sub-directories as opposed to just a list of files. I had all of these great ideas of how to solve these problems, and my brain was working overtime for the problems I didn't yet have an answer to. I was looking at source code for some common core UNIX file utilities like diff, cmp, cp, etc... looking for pointers...

And then it happened. I realized that I didn't need to make any sort of application. I realized my "problem" was non-existent. Why, you ask?

With the use of the built-in UNIX 'cp' command (file copy), and a few command line switches, I could achieve my sync behavior.

cp --recursive --update

Done.

--recursive handles the issue with multiple levels of directories, and --update handles the issue with determining if files are identical or not, as well as handling the mutual-add syncing.

The curious part comes in with my reaction to this discovery: I was totally bummed! As an engineer, you tend to want to have these problems to solve. Then, you are excited once you solve them. However, realizing there was never a problem to solve in the first place doesn't bring that same excitement, it in fact has the opposite effect.

It does illustrate a few important concepts of engineering though.

1. Don't re-invent the wheel.
2. Keep it simple, stupid!

Some engineers have a tendency to want to use complex or advanced solutions to problems which don't need them. I myself was bummed that such a simple solution would solve this problem, as I had envisioned a much more "sexy" method. This only leads to trouble down the road, and if at all possible, it's better to realize there's a better way to do something before you've finished doing it the wrong way.