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How to never complete anything

ewanvalentine.io

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Re: How to never complete anything

#161

Post by watwut »

ryandrake wrote: post #107
exDM69 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I probably do share too little, and I get too discouraged when reddit downvotes my stuff to oblivion. > Next time you build a product try to post it online everywhere like Reddit and Show HN. I'm sure you'll gain more confidence and experience from it. Here's the problem, I never "build a product". My free time is not nearly enough to build a proper product that would a) be fun for me to…

Wow, I was going to write my own story of putzing around with side projects here, but yours matches it perfectly. I've got a local repo with probably dozens of 50-100% completed hobby projects, but I don't really release anything. I used to release stuff but then it becomes a maintenance pain. Users don't get that this is a hobby for you, and don't understand why you don't respond and fix right this minute. This is e…

Out of curiosity, how did they pressured on you and which community was it in (linux/frontend/java/python/etc)? Many project I seen (and used) seem to be abandoned after a while or are maintained slowly, so you not being able to maintain long term seems pretty much standard to me.

Re: How to never complete anything

#162

Post by ryandrake »

watwut wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I was going to write my own story of putzing around with side projects here, but yours matches it perfectly. I've got a local repo with probably dozens of 50-100% completed hobby projects, but I don't really release anything. I used to release stuff but then it becomes a maintenance pain. Users don't get that this is a hobby for you, and don't understand why you don't respond and fix right this minute. This is e…

Out of curiosity, how did they pressured on you and which community was it in (linux/frontend/java/python/etc)? Many project I seen (and used) seem to be abandoned after a while or are maintained slowly, so you not being able to maintain long term seems pretty much standard to me.

Mostly free iOS apps.

Re: How to never complete anything

#163

Post by closed »

alexandersingh wrote: post #120

One technique that has helped me is what I call "atomic actions". What is the smallest action you can undertake, that you can build upon, which will help you realize your goal? I've wanted to write for years but thought I had to pen esoteric essays composed of thousands of words. Recently I just started writing short, simple posts that are helping me establish a habit, develop fluency and enjoy the process of writing…

Thanks for this advice. I love that the simplicity of your post demonstrates the concept it's teaching.

Re: How to never complete anything

#164

Post by superasn »

lubonay wrote: post #64
superasn wrote: post #53

I struggled through the same thing once I started with TDD. I've never had problems completing and shipping new products (a solo founder i launched 20 saas sites last year) but after reading dozens of documents about why TDD is an absolute must for any serious programmer my hubris got the best of me and I decided that I too will join the bandwagon. Boy, was i wrong.. Maybe for big teams it is a must but for soloprene…

That's an interesting take on TDD. It's supposed to be a tool that boosts your productivity, have you thought about why it decreased yours?

I think it's because I keep changing features, and specs on the fly. The site I plan and the site I actually launch have a difference of day and night and TDD adds a sort of rigidity to that. Creating mocks for API calls, mock Models, etc is just too much overhead.

Also the rewards haven't been that significant as people claim, at least for me. My focus right now is to spend most of the time on SEO / marketing / generating leads.

Re: How to never complete anything

#165

Post by matrixagent »

novaleaf wrote: post #147
majewsky wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ship daily" only works with web applications. If I were to ship my applications daily (or rather: each day where there occur changes), I would just be compiling packages all the time. (Before you ask: This cannot be automated further. I will not give my GPG key to some automation to sign the packages with.)

I automate my deploy process by passing my password as an argument to my automation script. maybe you can try figuring something similar out. Because yeah, by hand, even deploying my webapp would take a couple hours. it took me maybe 8hrs of labor to setup my deploy script but given as I've deployed maybe 50 times so far it's paid off.

Hours? Could you elaborate a bit what exactly you mean with "by hand"? I'm probably not thinking manually enough, I can't come up with what could possibly that time intensive about any deployment.

Re: How to never complete anything

#166

Post by DizzyDoo »

quadcore wrote: post #160
DizzyDoo wrote: post #49

I finished my side project a couple of years ago, released it, and then found I was able to quit my Python webdev job and go full time making video games. The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXl8lDrxn8 ) and that takes a lot of temptation to do what the OP is writing about, rewriting stuff in Haskell for example. The interesting bit when it comes to side…

Offtopic: great music in the video, have you done it yourself?

Audio is the only thing I don't do myself! I do the programming, art, writing and game design (and marketing/business stuff) but the audio side of things would be severely detrimental if I had to do that bit too.

The music is done by Peter Nickalls (http://peternickalls.com), a friend of mine that I've known for years and years. Too talented a composer to be working on my little projects, but I'm thankful for his work. The music he's worked on for my current, somewhat more ambitious project is absolutely incredible though.

Re: How to never complete anything

#167

Post by sbov »

nemacol wrote: post #78

As someone who is trying to learn to code on their own, I feel like I understand this. The first question of "which language/stack/etc should I learn first?" has haunted me for the years I have been trying and getting nowhere. Not EXACTLY the same problem as the author, because I am not building out scalable infrastructure. I just spent a ton of time learning the fundamentals of angular and node, then try to understa…

Any of them.

If this question has haunted you for literally years, the right question is "how do I get through my analysis paralysis", not "what is the right stack/language/etc."

Re: How to never complete anything

#168

Post by brazzledazzle »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #112
watwut wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I said "ship" it. not work harder. You can even ship something you built in a couple of hours. " I did that and gained nothing from it. I don't mean it as a complain, more like reality check - most of the time you don't magically learn by shipping whatever you done in few hours.

That's because "shipping" doesn't mean just posting it online randomly where nobody finds out. It's like saying "I have a Twitter account and nobody cares what I say, I never get a single reply or a like. Btw I have 0 followers". Shipping means getting it out there AND see what people think of it. If you at least tried to do that, you would have probably learned something. Even one person looking at your thing and gi…

It's not often I read a back-and-forth exchange like this and end up agreeing with both sides.

Re: How to never complete anything

#169

Post by snarf21 »

curun1r wrote: post #152

I have this same problem. My finish rate is abysmal, but I've actually finished a few. I've realized that finishing a project is roughly 10% exploration another 20% getting to working and at least 70% polish. The exploration phase is very enjoyable and it's what keeps me hopping from project to project. Occasionally, the enjoyment will phase will encourage me to keep plugging away at it until I get to working. This i…

Right, it is like going to the gym. Doing it with a buddy means that each of you can take a turn at motivating when the other is tapped out.

Re: How to never complete anything

#170

Post by equalarrow »

nemacol wrote: post #78

As someone who is trying to learn to code on their own, I feel like I understand this. The first question of "which language/stack/etc should I learn first?" has haunted me for the years I have been trying and getting nowhere. Not EXACTLY the same problem as the author, because I am not building out scalable infrastructure. I just spent a ton of time learning the fundamentals of angular and node, then try to understa…

I've built (and continue to) a lot of companies using Rails. I also do Swift on iOS and have been playing around with Swift on the server since last year.

I have some friends that have an idea and I'm going to help them build it. So what do I use? The fast, low memory footprint of Swift?

No. I use Rails. I use bootstrap. I don't make a JS only frontend with api backend (Turbolinks works fine). I use what makes me productive and what's gets the first rev out the quickest.

For hosting, I put it on my Mac Mini (in my living room) via VirtualBox, with the same Nginx proxy I use for all my projects. I have no problems with scaling because I don't need to. Cross that bridge IF I get there.

I went through a number of years trying the latest and greatest frameworks, aws configs, etc. None it mattered to my projects. It did help with day jobs, but that was it.

Some other poster here was right when he said tech is about 10% of your business. There is so much other stuff outside of building your app/site and having analysis paralysis is gonna stop you dead in your tracks.

My advice (as many on HN have said before): go with what you know, don't over engineer, ship early and often.

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