171–180 of 220 posts
I discovered this late, but am glad I did. Are you ready for it?
The secret is this:
don't start something till you finish the last thing, no matter how poorly.
This goes even at a "micro" level, so don't start distributing the load on servers till you finish the last thing (interface), no matter how poorly you finish the last thing.
Now you have the secret. Go forth and complete.
Okay, I am going to share my secret for finishing. I discovered this late, but am glad I did. Are you ready for it? The secret is this: don't start something till you finish the last thing, no matter how poorly. This goes even at a "micro" level, so don't start distributing the load on servers till you finish the last thing (interface), no matter how poorly you finish the last thing. Now you have the secret. Go forth…
It's okay not to ship personal projects. No one's really holding you accountable for that. Look at it this way, unfinished personal projects still give you value because you might still be using it in its incomplete state, and you learned something when making it. As you become a more experienced engineer, it's common to have more unfinished personal projects because you have difficulty approaching it with a hacker m…
I used to dream up grand plans, start building, and before I got to the end I'd have thought up three more things I wanted to build. That isn't any way to finish anything, it's a good way to learn about limitations and develop new skills.
By scope way down, have a few ideas and consider what they share between them. What single feature will I need. I build that. But, that feature in and of itself has a lot of parts so I pick one and I build that. If it has smaller parts, I build one of those.
Instead of building some grand machine, I build gears. It's far more satisfying.
1. External Deadlines. I'm a career teacher, mostly self-taught Python/Django developer, and am applying for dev jobs. The school year's over in June, and I want to be able to step into a new jr position in July/August. I'm planning to resign my position this spring, and cannot be out of work. My benefits and salary will stop in September. I'm f'ed if I'm not working by then. The need to ship projects (if only into my portfolio) is high.
2. "Deep Work" for time management. Ideas from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" have been foundational in my getting more done. It's hard to find the energy to build my side projects/portfolio after wrangling eight year olds all day, so I started getting up at 5 am solely to work on my projects. I make coffee and toast then get to my desk. I close all applications except Atom, Dash, and Firefox; turn on Do Not Disturb; look at my to-do list in my notebook; then get to work. Having 75 un-interrupted minutes before my wife gets up allows me to get a huge amount done, and it's become gratifying to watch the 6 am commits pile up on my github punch card. I've also found that exerting discipline in this facet of my life has had a positive knock-on effect in other areas.
I share the pain. I'm incredibly productive at my day job architecting and tying together a plethora of microservices to deliver a platform of unified products. Outside of work i am absolutely freaking worthless. My problem is largely perfectionism. I've started working on seemingly great ideas and then took a turn to build a tool that would make task A less hack-ish. A few weeks later I'd open-source the tool/librar…
Two things have made a huge different in my ability to finish/ship: 1. External Deadlines. I'm a career teacher, mostly self-taught Python/Django developer, and am applying for dev jobs. The school year's over in June, and I want to be able to step into a new jr position in July/August. I'm planning to resign my position this spring, and cannot be out of work. My benefits and salary will stop in September. I'm f'ed i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a rationalization and you know it. There are tons of other people who also think side project is a way to learn something new, yet they ship. Also there are tons of startups that started out as side projects. Facebook did. You have no excuse. Stop lying to yourself because it's not doing yourself any good. The only reason you're not releasing your side projects to the world is because you are afraid of critic…
> Stop lying to yourself because it's not doing yourself any good. The only reason you're not releasing your side projects to the world is because you are afraid of criticism. I often set the bar so high there is no chance I could ever finish. The only projects that are attractive and shiny enough are those that are too big to finish. E.g. I could choose between writing, completing and shipping a small indie game. Or…
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…