Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something?

#21

Post by philomath_mn » Fri, May 13, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

Hopefully this doesn't come across as too aggressive, but it seems like the other comments are pulling their punches.

There is a difference between

> I find myself studying too much in order to make something that I want

And

> So I start learning about the history of dashboards

The former is a classic problem in engineering, the latter is kinda nuts. If you are studying the history of something before building your first version, then you are almost certainly avoiding the work.

If you want to read up on the history as you build it, that is one thing. If you are going to build a company around dashboards and want a good first-principles strategy, then history might also fit in.

Otherwise, dive in, validate your idea, and make something work before you start reading about special topics, let alone the history.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something?

#22

Post by d--b » Fri, May 13, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

I don’t study anything, I just jump right into it and study while doing it.

I do this with programming, but with other stuff too. I am teaching myself to sew right now. I just bought a sewing machine, wanted to make a yukata in african fabric and just did it. It’s all weird and not very well put together, but I am happy to wear it. Then I am making more complicated stuff.

“Just give it a shot and see how far you can go” is some advice I read somewhere and that suits me sell.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something?

#23

Post by robinrheem » Fri, May 13, 2022, 4:32 AM UTC

philomath_mn wrote: post #21

Hopefully this doesn't come across as too aggressive, but it seems like the other comments are pulling their punches. There is a difference between > I find myself studying too much in order to make something that I want And > So I start learning about the history of dashboards The former is a classic problem in engineering, the latter is kinda nuts. If you are studying the history of something before building your f…

Not aggressive at all! I'm just grateful for your knowledge. It looks like procrastination but I don't have any intentions of avoiding work. I just like satisfying my curiosity. If I come to the dashboard example again, I want to know when it was made, how it was made, who made it, with what process. I don't like history books that just makes a story and facts. But I do want to know how Darwin got interested in species, what he wrote down in his journals, how he got to think about it, how he thought about it, etc. Same thing with the creator of dashboards.

To make it more precise, if I want to make something with Ruby on Rails for example, I tend to learn everything about Ruby on Rails. What kind of components it has, how the magic works, watch every video about its best practices, distilling everything. Then I find about DHH(creator of Ruby on Rails) and find how he built it in the first place. What thought process he had, what needs he had, how he got to build it, what he was thinking when he wrote the first version of Ruby on Rails, etc. Once I need a job processing library, I do that again.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something?

#24

Post by newusertoday » Fri, May 13, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

i do that as well, i look at it as investment. Recently i wanted to add pub/sub in my app so i looked at multiple libs and i found most of the libs are doing it synchronously and leave async to user however the reason i want to add pub/sub was to continue with the main thread while leaving async to the libs also most of them are taking the lock for the entire time they are publishing which kind of kills the performance. If i had not investigated this i would have taken the latest lib and than would have to do lot of work later so i can see it as time wasted or time saved.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you study in order to do/make something?

#25

Post by PaulHoule » Fri, May 13, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

kanonieer wrote: post #16

robinrheem wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were in your situation I would be studying about all the static site generators, onpremise self-served blog services, any type of new blog service that are good for writing about art and math. Okay, then what theme would be best? Survey them on each platform. What markup language would be best to write about art and math? Find about LaTeX, org-mode, Markdown, etc. I pretty much tend to do this kind of thing for…

This sounds like you're doing everything in your power to avoid doing the actual thing.

It's hard to say. For any project there is a mixture of planning and doing. I think the person you're responding to is planning too much, but a certain amount of research is necessary.

In the case of my blog project I did try a 'spike implementation' with hugo and got so far to get a test instance online. It wasn't love at first site so I'm probably going to try another static site generator, probably one written in Python so I'll be able to incorporate a lot of code I've already written.

Wider than that I need to school myself more on CSS and particularly how to make layouts that scale across desktop and mobile (and don't make me want to puke!) That's a project of its own that is kindof the opposite of a spike implementation because i want to cover the ground thoroughly.