11–20 of 114 posts
I suggest that instead of this approach, you take an approach of starting by overengineering it and making it absolutely perfect in every way - then just ship the part of that you manage to actually do.
Sometimes the best way to write a short story is to write a three-volume epic.
The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).
I'm going to go ahead and disagree. I suggest that instead of this approach, you take an approach of starting by overengineering it and making it absolutely perfect in every way - then just ship the part of that you manage to actually do. Sometimes the best way to write a short story is to write a three-volume epic.
I'm going to go ahead and disagree. I suggest that instead of this approach, you take an approach of starting by overengineering it and making it absolutely perfect in every way - then just ship the part of that you manage to actually do. Sometimes the best way to write a short story is to write a three-volume epic.
No, that's how you end up with a bad short story.
Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today ( https://instacalc.com ). The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).
Tangentially related to the article, did BetterExplained itself start out as a side project, or did you double-down from the start?
I'm going to go ahead and disagree. I suggest that instead of this approach, you take an approach of starting by overengineering it and making it absolutely perfect in every way - then just ship the part of that you manage to actually do. Sometimes the best way to write a short story is to write a three-volume epic.
My biggest enemy is always analysis paralysis. The bigger the project, the less likely I am to ever even start, much less finish anything. Likewise, when I do start, if the scope is too big, I'll flit from concept to concept never really finishing any of them. But, when I have a very small, concrete, and actionable item, I can knock it out in no time...it almost doesn't even feel like work sometimes.
I don't think the "overengineer it" approach could ever work for me.
Start with a credit card form. If nobody would pay for it, why would you invest precious time building it? You have better things to do. :)
Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today ( https://instacalc.com ). The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).
InstaCalc is great! Love the natural language oriented input for calculations. Tangentially related to the article, did BetterExplained itself start out as a side project, or did you double-down from the start?
Sadly after a decade the CS department shut down my alumni account :(. But I have a cached backup here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150708043012/http://www.cs.pri...
https://betterexplained.com/~kazad/
I started BetterExplained about 10 years ago exactly (wow), just taking some of the notes online. Thankfully they were on evergreen math topics (divergence, flux, gradients... stuff I desperately wanted intuitions for) and it grew from there.
I had been thinking of doing a decade year retrospective on what's worked/not worked in terms of keeping motivation and momentum for the projects (so far, so good). Thanks for the reminder!
Start with a credit card form. If nobody would pay for it, why would you invest precious time building it? You have better things to do. :)