Use pencils and paper. Learn one tool and learn it well.
Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#42AKA yak shaving - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_t...
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#43Having worked with webpack and babel at large-social-network for the past year, they're great tools and make a whole range of things possible. But as soon as anything breaks or behaves unexpectedly you are in for a hell of a time even just figuring out at what layer or step of the pipeline the breakage occurred.
So it's not just you. I would never set any of this up from scratch for a personal project. And I don't expect you'd need to, ever - established companies will have an existing pipeline (with its own problems you'd never learn externally), and new ones can just use one of the various boilerplate project templates.
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#44I call this 'feeding the machine'. There's the thing you want to do, the interesting, valuable, real-world problem you're trying to solve. But you're using a library, that has a dependency, that doesn't build on your machine, because of your version of the compiler, and the new version isn't in your package repository, so you have to download and build it, but your version of readline is wrong and so on and so on. Yo…
> You can have a long, happy and prosperous career working with a single stack that someone has made work on your OS of choice, but if you don't enjoy feeding the machine, there is a ceiling on your flexibility and problem solving ability.
That's what gets to me the most. I'm fairly confident in my problem solving abilities and coding skills. But I frequently lose all motivation to do good work when 80% of what I do is "feed the machine". There are times when doing it makes sense for the problem at hand, and then I feel motivated, but most of the time feeding the machine is about dealing with shitty code, bad documentation and unnecessary overengineering.
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#45I call this 'feeding the machine'. There's the thing you want to do, the interesting, valuable, real-world problem you're trying to solve. But you're using a library, that has a dependency, that doesn't build on your machine, because of your version of the compiler, and the new version isn't in your package repository, so you have to download and build it, but your version of readline is wrong and so on and so on. Yo…
I really like this analogy! The only thing I'll add is that I don't think you necessarily have to enjoy "feeding the machine", but as you said, you need to realize that it doesn't go away and that a lot of our value as software developers comes from our ability to continue to make forward progress when it happens (and sometimes even inventing a new way around it). I certainly don't always enjoy it while it's happening, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment when it's finished.
This phenomenon is one also of the biggest reasons people who set out to "learn to code" end up giving up.
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#46Stop-and-start development is completely normal when you introduce a lot of project tooling and it's new and shiny. For this reason, projects run by a solo developer tend to use less tooling and process than team efforts; the friction introduced by each new step in the workflow is a major penalty. The solo developer can just opt to ignore all the cruft and use a cheap, lazy option, because there is no communication i…
> temporarily change your mindset from "engineer building software" to "writer building documentation"
Excellent suggestion. But also here, focus on a tool and/or workflow is warranted. Meandering the field is very productive; it has its time and place. But it is not a panacea for a deep dive. Sustained focus remains necessary.
Writing documentation can be a rewarding, productive, and, yes, even noble method for taking a deep dive.
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I am in the JavaScript ecosystem. I feel like I'm trying to escape from an Amazonian jungle of errors and things that don't work, trying to find a path that appears and disappears and sometimes is trodden by others and sometimes grown over, always with thorns and strangle vines, dead ends, thousand foot waterfall roadblocks. My food is running out and my feet hurt and by day the sun burns and at night there are t…
Writing JavaScript and feeling you're surrounded by errors is pretty normal. It's a hastily-designed language. There's no getting away from the fact that everything is going to feel a little bit fragile. Just accept it and don't expect perfection.
Hastily designed for version 0.0.1, this is simply not the case if you are using modern EMCAScript
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#48Since I see that you're a Javascript developer, I'm going to suggest you switch to something like Meteor.
It's COHESIVE. You have an idea and want to work on it? It'll just work, no bullshit gluing together bits and pieces from other libraries. It's comes with realtime, javascript everywhere, documentation is on point.
I can guarantee it's going to restore your faith because you will spend most of your time writing your features and ideas, instead of glue work. Nobody likes glue work.
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Where do I start? Right here: https://www.udemy.com/learn-meteorjs-by-building-10-real-wor... - you build ten real world apps, not some shitty task list garbage. I promise you won't regret it, it's -fun-. Like that first time you used Rails way back when? That kind of fun!
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#49My first large app I built the hard way. I started by copying code from samples and modified them to my needs. I stuffed a bunch of api's together, dojo, jquery, etc. I spent an inordinate amount of time testing the app and modifying it to work on all browsers. Half of the time I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I just obsessively kept hacking away until the app got built.
Well, it got built and it's been successful for its built purpose. The code isn't exactly pretty but it's fast and not buggy at all.
I spent the last year learning object oriented programming, software architecture, ui toolkits. I'm just starting with react, typescript, node, aws for my new app.
Because I built my first app 'the hard way' I now appreciate the value of these toolkits and frameworks and think they're worth taking the time to learn, but only if they simplify my process and not complicate it.
Keep working you'll get there and it's worth it!
Re: Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
#50One more thing, when I first read about something like Grunt or Backbone, I didn't really get it. After several months of reading blog posts, articles, books and hacker news I started to get it.