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How to never complete anything

ewanvalentine.io

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Re: How to never complete anything

#211

Post by mattbgates »

the_overseer wrote: post #206
mattbgates wrote: post #35

I pretty much go to work and code. Then I come home and code until I cannot code anymore and pass out from exhaustion. Good article. Started off with me thinking I actually wrote it. But I think you lack motivation to finish because you are content with the way your life is. I first started creating a project or two that were completely free. These projects helped me learn what people like and if people were even int…

I am a manager. Wanna know why other departments have advantages and yours doesn't? Because they are more important. Truth hurts, I know but bear with me. You've been programming for 20 years and not moved into management. That is a big huge red flag right there. It means you just like coding and don't care about the business. Business always comes first. For you it seems it doesn't. So it's only natural that you don…

I do get what you are saying, and what you state is all the more reason why I continue to be motivated to keep working on side projects and getting my business going.

Unfortunately, they chose a guy who was there for 15 years with no experience over anyone else. I had to train him. I had no say in that matter. He has been buddy-buddy with the Vice President of the company for that long as well. Again: There was nothing I could do about it. Other than his attention to detail, he has no coding skills. He doesn't have any management or leadership skills, either.

I have another boss who is above him who has me work on some side projects too, steals those ideas, presents them to the company as if they came up with it, and completely takes all the credit. What do I do about that? Say no and get fired? Suffer losing a job that I do actually enjoy doing that pays me enough to pay my bills? If you are a manager, you know that corporate world very well, don't you? Everyone is out for themselves. Everyone is just a number and is expendable. I know this -- my company has a high turnover rate.

I have bills to pay so I have to put up with this for now. The difference between me and other people (except for the ones on Hacker News :P): I'm doing something about it. I could go get hired by another company and make double what I am making now, but I run into the same situation over and over again: I am working for someone and putting up with the same exact bullshit. Every job. Every time.

I am comfortable with my current job so I see no reason to leave. I am working on improving my situation to get out of it. If I can do both: I would happily continue working for my company while running my side business and making a ton of money doing it.

So you are absolutely correct: I'm not trying to be a code monkey. I'm trying to run a business on my own that will help me escape the corporate slavery that I find myself stuck in at this time.

Re: How to never complete anything

#213

Post by superasn »

ernsheong wrote: post #154
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…

For a small team you should probably only TDD the most critical stuff, and not everything. Stuff that has huge paybacks, critical code. Generally I have been reverting to coding first, unless in scenarios where I waste more time trying to manually test it.

You are absolutely correct, but I learned it the hard way.

For solopreneurs the time is much better spent on marketing especially generating leads because it gives 1,000 times more return than time spent on writing tests and probably saving a few bugs later.

Re: How to never complete anything

#214

Post by the_overseer »

mattbgates wrote: post #211
the_overseer wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a manager. Wanna know why other departments have advantages and yours doesn't? Because they are more important. Truth hurts, I know but bear with me. You've been programming for 20 years and not moved into management. That is a big huge red flag right there. It means you just like coding and don't care about the business. Business always comes first. For you it seems it doesn't. So it's only natural that you don…

I do get what you are saying, and what you state is all the more reason why I continue to be motivated to keep working on side projects and getting my business going. Unfortunately, they chose a guy who was there for 15 years with no experience over anyone else. I had to train him. I had no say in that matter. He has been buddy-buddy with the Vice President of the company for that long as well. Again: There was nothi…

I'd still try to change jobs. I mean you could make double and there is also a chance you don't run into the same types of assholes. I am not saying you won't, I am saying there is a chance. Also, high turnover rate is a big big red flag. Be a part of that turnover rate :). Of course, keep on trucking on your own personal projects and good luck starting your business!

Re: How to never complete anything

#215

Post by perrygeo »

rev_null wrote: post #79

What's with the cheap shot at haskell at the end? I've shipped a couple of side projects in haskell.

I interpreted that not as a cheap shot against Haskell but a warning to avoid constantly chasing the perfect technological solution. (IOW just ship what you've got instead of constantly tinkering)

Re: How to never complete anything

#216

Post by zild3d »

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…

Congratulations. Reminds me of the mobile game trainyard which has a similar logical task, but your game adds some nice depth, story, humor, and art.

* http://trainyard.ca/

Re: How to never complete anything

#217

Post by majewsky »

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.

I already have a Makefile to automate most of the steps, but you still need to write changelogs, push a signed tag to Github, update the package specs and create and push all the repos.

Re: How to never complete anything

#218

Post by leethargo »

alkonaut wrote: post #150
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #38

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 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.

This reminds of a chapter in "Computer Power and Human Reason" where Joseph Weizenbaum describes the differences between compulsive programmers and professionals.

> His main interest is, in any case, not in small programs, but in very large, very ambitious systems of programs. Usually the systems he undertakes to build, and on which he works feverishly for perhaps a month or two or three, have very grandiose but extremely imprecisely stated goals. [...] It is characteristic of many such projects that the programmer can long continue in the conviction that they demand knowledge about nothing but computers, programming, etc. And that knowledge he, of course, commands in abundance. Indeed, the point at which such work is often abandoned is precisely when it ceases to be purely incestuous, i.e., when programming would have to be interrupted in order that knowledge from outside the computer world may be acquired.

Re: How to never complete anything

#219

Post by alkonaut »

leethargo wrote: post #218
alkonaut wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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. This reminds of a chapter in "Computer Power and Human Reason" where Joseph Weizenbaum describes the differences between compulsive programmers and professionals. > His main interest is, in any case, not in small programs, but in very large, very ambitious…

My interest is usually more in some specific problem or algorithm. I'm curious how subsurface scattering works so I write a sloppy pathtracer just to act as a shell for what I really wanted to do - the complex algorithm. Once I get it half working I'm done, because the goal was neither to make a product or to finish even the subsurface scattering part perfectly, the goal was to code and to understand the algorithm.

I'm not really in it to create, and that's perhaps the key. I write programs because that's how I understand problems. If I could understand something by reading a book or Wikipedia page then I'd often just do that and not have to do the coding at all!

Doing this kind of superficial learning-through-coding is fantastically effective I must say.

Re: How to never complete anything

#220

Post by novaleaf »

matrixagent wrote: post #165
novaleaf wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"By Hand" I mean running each command required to deploy line-by-line, at the command line.

For me, that would be:

1) provision VM

2) configure the new VM (security hardening, install utils)

3) download app from git and configure it

4) take image of vm

5) install new image into my autoscaler

6) hot-replace live instances of previous version with new version.

doing each of those commands by hand and waiting for each to complete could easily take 1.5 or 2 hours of work. I did it by hand the first couple times but once I figured out my workflow I automated it (bash script) as fast as possible.

I spent a couple days looking into ansible, but as I have a very specific need I didn't want to spend 2+ weeks adding another chunk of "technical debt" to my product.

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