I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
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I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
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Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#2I feel like my experience is the opposite of this.
I've never understood something until it stood between me and building what I needed to build.
This approach has been great professionally, but lately I'm becoming more interested in theory intensive fields and struggling to find resources that teach from the perspective of someone who wants to build something that requires the knowledge involved, rather than someone who just wants that knowledge.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#3> When I try to build something new, I find myself instantly criticizing my technique, to the point of paralysis. This function is hard to test; this object's dependencies need to be injected rather than initialized internally; that module needs an integration test; and so on and so forth. Even when writing spike or proof of concept code, I find myself revisiting the same lines over and over again, looking for the best, most natural expression of the ideas it contains -- obsessing, like Catt said, over my own construct, rather than on the thing my code does.
I used to be like this for the first few years of programming. And I knew a guy at my last job who was exactly like this. The thing that helped me, when I felt the indecision paralysis come on, is to just do something and accept that it may be wrong. You often don't know the best decision in the first place because you lack experience. Doing it the right way by accident, or making the mistake of picking the wrong way helps get you that experience. Be deliberate about always doing something, and over time the paralysis will get less and less as you gain more experience.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#4You just a need priority list. If you think something needs to be fixed, add it to the list. Choose the next task with the highest priority when you are done with the current one. At least you will know why you didn't fix something. It would be most likely be because there are only so many hours in a day, and your skill does not change overnight, despite obsessing over it.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#5I feel like my experience is the opposite of this. I've never understood something until it stood between me and building what I needed to build. This approach has been great professionally, but lately I'm becoming more interested in theory intensive fields and struggling to find resources that teach from the perspective of someone who wants to build something that requires the knowledge involved, rather than someone…
I'm often curious about the theory, or at least the "How do I do X?", bits of programming. What helps me is picking something I'm curious about, and then figuring out how to be curious about a smaller piece of it.
Lately I've been curious about how I could go about building a web framework in Elixir. I started off buy spending this past Sunday digging into how to open sockets/ports, and send requests from my browser, and reply to them from the Elixir command line REPL.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#6Here's a priority list that you should typically follow for making anything.
1. Make it work.
2. Make it not break.
3. Make it fast.
That's it really. Until the performance of something is blocking what you need to do somewhere else leave it the hell alone.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#7[deleted]
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#8Here's a priority list that you should typically follow for making anything. 1. Make it work. 2. Make it not break. 3. Make it fast. That's it really. Until the performance of something is blocking what you need to do somewhere else leave it the hell alone.
4. Make it manageable.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#9> When I try to build something new, I find myself instantly criticizing my technique, to the point of paralysis. This function is hard to test; this object's dependencies need to be injected rather than initialized internally; that module needs an integration test; and so on and so forth. Even when writing spike or proof of concept code, I find myself revisiting the same lines over and over again, looking for the be…
Depends on your industry and where you work obviously. But I have a strict "that will do" policy. If it looks like it might work, that will do.
It won't' be well engineered, it will be buggy. But the project will be completed and released. If it makes some sales and looks like it has some traction, then I go back and visit the many (many) //todo - clean this up and refactor everything out.
Usually after a while of adding more features, hacking out nasty design decisions the best way on how to do it comes to the fore naturally.
Re: I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff
#10I feel like my experience is the opposite of this. I've never understood something until it stood between me and building what I needed to build. This approach has been great professionally, but lately I'm becoming more interested in theory intensive fields and struggling to find resources that teach from the perspective of someone who wants to build something that requires the knowledge involved, rather than someone…
I've been just like this - without the context of a problem to solve, theoretical things just don't click for me. Regex was a mystery and impossible to memorize until I had to write a matcher for a class, and I haven't forgotten since. Similarly, I never get stuck at work, because everything I learn has a problem behind it, but as soon as I go home and try to teach myself something for fun I derp out immediately.