We’re having dinner, and my younger sister decides to break the silence with, “I have an idea for a website.”

By the tone of her voice, I knew this wasn’t another spur of the moment type idea. She had put a lot of thought into this nugget. “Oh, really? What?”

“It’s a website where people can go and put in the ‘me’ part of the kermit meme, and the website returns a completed meme with the ‘inner me’ response.”

If you’re not familiar, here’s an example of that meme.

kermit meme

“Oh I see. So the website would return ‘inner me’ responses that people have already written before on the internet.”

Hm…

Naturally, my brain is already racing to think up ways to implement the idea.

A web scraper to crawl the internet for all the kermit memes. The kermit frog meme is usually an image, I’ll probably have to run the results of the scraper through Optical Character Recognition in order to get the text. A database to store all the “me” and “inner me” entries the web scraper comes across.

There’s a problem. “What if the ‘me’ entry has never been done before?”

Before she answers, my brain has already chimed in with another idea and I start thinking of using machine learning on past responses to create a fitting response to the new entry.

Her voice pulls me back to reality.

“There would be a loading screen, and,” she tries to suppress a chuckle, “I would be alerted about someone making a never-before-seen entry and I would just come up with something right then and there.”

Of course.

In my mental engineering stupor, I had forgotten about simpler, timeless solutions. The solutions that don’t scale. This wasn’t a new concept to me.

A few years before this story, I learned plastic bags couldn’t be recycled with the other plastic items like water bottles and milk jugs. Even though I hadn’t known, I couldn’t help but feel guilty for throwing my plastic bags away in the wrong place my entire life. In that moment, there might as well have been no difference between me and the CEO of ExxonMobil. I had to right my wrongs.

So in an attempt to increase the recycling of plastic bags, I made a website where people could sign up to have their plastic bags picked up and delivered to a suitable recycling center.

All the website actually did was send me an email with the address, where I would ride my own bike to pick up the bags and bring them to the recycling center myself.

I was grateful to relearn this lesson. As an engineer, it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing more technology as the solution, like building a web scraper vs manually inputting all the memes yourself, but in business, it is much more difficult to assess what is right and wrong. Even as a fancy engineer who works at big corporations with the best technology, never forget your “inner me” duct tape programmer side, because sometimes, they’ll be the one with the better solution.