A lot about good software engineering and design is about listening - listening to that little voice in your head that's telling you you're pushing it, forcing a design or an implementation onto a problem that's not a good fit.
It's very hard for me to listen to this voice when I've got a particular solution in mind, and I'm plugging away implementing this solution, and if I can just get past this next hurdle, it will work, dammit!
Yesterday I finally noticed I was banging my head against a problem. I thought about what the struggle was, and I realized that most of my pain was in trying to coordinate two separate threads of control through the system - one doing updates and one posting those updates to listeners.
So I decided to apply a common principle for me: question your assumptions. Did they really have to be coordinated? I contacted some other members of the team and our product manager and asked what they thought. It turns out there was much more flexibility than I thought was possible. If I tried to stop having absolute control, as it were, relaxed a bit, and let things be a little loosy-goosy, then my overall design became much less coupled and thus much simpler. Ahhh....
It reminds me of the beauty of eventual consistency - if you let go some of your tight constraints, it's amazing how it opens things up and brings new possibilities into the solution.
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