51–54 of 54 posts
I've also heard this as, "Cut the first chapter from your novel, that's where all the boring stuff is."
If you start in medias res to begin with, you can just skip writing the boring part.
In so many endeavors the hardest part is beginning. Starting a new job. Starting an exercise program. Quitting smoking. Leaving your comfort zone to do something new. For many people, starting a new software project can be intimidating: the open green field of endless possibilities can be paralyzing. Starting a machine learning class has made me feel dumb at first, so I quit. The trick is to just start, and understan…
This is bad advice unless you are a complete novice. Industry experience seems to weigh in on the side of focused analysis: you need to better understand the problem space and break a potential implementation down to a relatively simplistic first stage goal.
Relevant quotes:
Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays. - Pahl and Beitz, 'Engineering Design' (2007)
Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is. - Gordon Glegg, 'The Design of Design' (1969)
In practice, designing seems to proceed by oscillating between sub-solution and sub-problem areas, as well as by decomposing the problem and combining sub-solutions. - Nigel Cross
Success really depends on the conception of the problem, the design of the system, not in the details of how it's coded. - Leslie Lamport
You're not going to come up with a simple design through any kind of coding techniques or any kind of programming language concepts. Simplicity has to be achieved above the code level before you get to the point which you worry about how you actually implement this thing in code. - Leslie Lamport
... more @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup (which has a whole section of quotes 'writing with applicability to software')
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard lots of people say that, but it almost always just means the pan isn't hot enough! Wait an extra minute and the first one will usually be fine. I'm not sure how that translates back to writing, though...
All these years I thought I was spreading wisdom, but it turns out I just don't know how to make pancakes. :|
The worst way to begin a text: In capter 1, we will describe ..., then in chapter 2 we will take a look at ..., and then in chapter 3, we ...
Taken literally, the style is horrible. But as a concept, particularly for a complex work, laying out the structure in advance, and periodically touching base to detail what's been covered and what's yet to come isn't a bad idea. Of course, in a text, readers can accomplish this for themselves by skimming the contents, flipping to the end, and examining the notes and/or bibliography, and index (assuming a book-length treatment). I'll frequently skim an article, essay, or book first, to get a sense of its structure.
Reading and re-reading is another approach.
I get a stronger sense that such "here is the structure of this book" type introductions are born from initial outlines which guided the author. In many cases they can be significantly streamlined, but they're not entirely useless. Among technical books, the O'Reilly formula is generally pretty good -- it provides guidance but isn't overly pedantic.