Trust your frust

Most people are familiar with the fable of the frogs in the boiling pot of water. When you compare the gradually heating water to the frustration that you can feel when solving challenging problems with software, it’s easy to see how applicable the fable is to everything we do day-to-day. So, if frustration is a normal part of building software, how do you separate harmless, benign frustration from the deeper nagging frustration that indicates that you need to change gears, rethink your approach, and jump out of the proverbial pot?

Our colleague, Luke Karrys coined the phrase: “trust your frust”  (trust your frustration) as a reminder that our frustrations often have intuition baked into them. Knowing how to trust our frust has led us to make significant shifts in our approaches to the way we think about and build software — shifts that, in retrospect, have improved the process and outcome of our work in major ways.

– Terry Carter