Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The art of over-engineering your side projects

elsyms.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 272 posts

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#211

Post by danielharrison »

johnfn wrote: post #185
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

This is not specific to programming, but personalities in general. There are people who love the journey and others who love the destination.

People rarely switch from one to the other. It's part of our core ideals.

However, there is a large, vocal, percentage from both these groups that will always voice their opinion against an opposition opinion. It's not a competition and there's no correct answer. It's purely subjective.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#212

Post by raldu »

johnfn wrote: post #185
czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

I think its embedded into the "maker" mindset in general and does not necessarily have to be one way or the other. It's both.

A writer can have lots of poetry, personal expository essays, journals, unfinished drafts lying around OR s/he can "ship" a best-selling novel, publish a high-traffic blog or something.

Similarly, a painter would experiment with lots of techniques, colors, textures "on the side," again having lots of personal work lying around, yet would probably treat something s/he would put in an exhibition differently.

In the first case, you are experimenting, discovering, breathing; while in the second case you have to think hard about your audience, your readers, or your customers.

It's built-in.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#213

Post by spott »

As in everything: figure out what you are trying to get out of your side project.

If you want something to generate a nice supplementary income stream, or practice for starting a company when you get "that great idea" then this article is very good advice.

On the other hand, if you are trying to learn a new technology stack, develop experience in building scalable architectures or even beefing up your project management skills then this is terrible advice.

So, the real art is figuring out what you want out of your side project.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#214

Post by n1vz3r »

I really like over-engineering my side projects. I have three frameworks, one in PHP, one in JS, and one in PHP/JS (a bit abandoned) that no one really uses. But you know what? Because no one uses them, I'm not burdened by any opinion except mine. When I change something, I don't read death threats because someone's solution stopped working. And since I don't have any deadlines, I can spend as much time as I want to get the exact solution as I planned. I don't need to compromise. That's quite opposite thing to what I do at worktime and get paid for.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#215

Post by iteriteratedone »

czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

I offer a middle path , a bhudist interpertation of the problem. A project can be both fun/innovative and productive. You iterate on the fun , then you iterate on the productive. Youll never acheive completeness in both. Youll always suffer from needing to improve on aspect. Life is suffering , learn to accept and not let that reality stop you from creating.

But some projects are more innovative or productive than others. Maybe you should abstract those projects away from eachother? You could put them in seperate classes. You could have the productive project use the innovative project.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#216

Post by marcosdumay »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #126
amyjess wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never regretted taking the time to make sure my projects have a proper logging infrastructure with every possible thing fed to the logger. I've built logging support libraries to set up AOP hooks to auto-log the call stack at all times, and it's been a lifesaver. I can't imagine not over-architecting this kind of stuff. I know I'd be in a world of pain several times if I hadn't.

How do you prefer to store/ship logs?

That's completely dependent on the format of your infrastructure. There is no answer that will fit everybody, and asking around for advice of strangers may even bias you in a damaging way.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#217

Post by marcosdumay »

always_good wrote: post #128
kerkeslager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potential customers do care about the stack you're running. They care if they have to download Java or Flash. They care if they have to be connected to the internet or can use your product offline. They care if your program starts quickly. They care if your program runs quickly once started. They care if your program has bugs (let's not pretend different languages aren't more or less error-prone). They care if your p…

Notice how just about none of them are the user caring about your stack. In other words, when confronted about your high bug rate, you're not going to get anywhere going "heh, you see, Python was just more convenient than a statically-typed language and this lead to..."

All of those are pretty much influenced by your stack. If you need a highly reliable software, you would be stupid to write it in Python.

You are right that nobody will care if you use them as excuses. But that is not what the GP said.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#218

Post by drdrey »

czep wrote: post #176

The whole point of a side project is to over-engineer it! The thought of holding myself to deadlines and driving myself to "ship" is totally antithetical to the entire purpose of a hobby project. It's a welcome relief from the 9-to-5 constant necessity to cut corners and finish things without ever properly understanding them because there's no time. For my side projects, I actually want to go down rabbit holes. I wil…

The premise of the story is that you want to deliver an MVP. Your premise is that side-projects are a nice way to geek out on tech. Both are valid, but you have to make sure what you're trying to accomplish before spending quality time with rabbit holes.

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#219

Post by MaysonL »

raldu wrote: post #212
johnfn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is made up of two groups in ever constant warfare, the yin and yang, as it were- the group who thinks that programming should be fun, experimental and enjoyable, and the group that thinks that programming is a means to the end of getting a product to market and nothing more. Whenever a post from one group (such as the article) comes out, a post from the other (such as OP) will quickly appear. And everyone loves it…

I think its embedded into the "maker" mindset in general and does not necessarily have to be one way or the other. It's both. A writer can have lots of poetry, personal expository essays, journals, unfinished drafts lying around OR s/he can "ship" a best-selling novel, publish a high-traffic blog or something. Similarly, a painter would experiment with lots of techniques, colors, textures "on the side," again having…

A writer can have lots of poetry, personal expository essays, journals, unfinished drafts lying around OR s/he can "ship" a best-selling novel, publish a high-traffic blog or something.

There are also writers who can do all of these: my personal favourite is Robert Graves (possibly because once many years ago I got him to autograph his Selected Poems and his memoir Goodbye to all That).

Re: The art of over-engineering your side projects

#220

Post by delhanty »

0xfaded wrote: post #209
delhanty wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I had a problem which required finding the minimum distance between an ellipse and a point. If that had been my day job ... OT: I had the problem as part of my 1st day job in 1990 on Parasolid. IIRC, there was more than one way of converting the problem into solving a quartic polynomial, which is solvable by radicals and so doesn't need Newton's method. If the point is inside the evolute of the ellipse then the quar…

There are certainly multiple ways of doing it. I'm curious, do you remember if the specific quartic had a nice "trick" to the formulation? I played with it a little and couldn't see anything that would cancel in a nice way. I try to avoid using quadratic solutions in code because of numeric instability issues. Granted I never implemented the direct solution, but the number of opportunities for catastrophic cancellati…

I don't think there was any trick.

One approach is to use the rational quadratic parametrization of the ellipse and substitute that into the squared distance function to get a quartic.

>I try to avoid using quadratic solutions in code because of numeric instability issues.

Sensible!

Back then the quartic solver had been written already and extensively tested by someone else - probably for line X torus intersection.

Even so there were numerical problems introduced because the quartic was in power basis and so the coefficients didn't have geometric meaning. I guess phenomena like Wilkinson's polynomial could occur. [0]

If I was doing it today, I would probably proceed as follows:

1. special case for the point exactly on an axis.

2. otherwise, choose the quadrant containing the point and represent that as a rational quadratic Bezier curve. This parametrizes the quadrant from 0 to 1 and is guaranteed to contain the global minimum.

3. substitute the quadratic Bezier curve into the square distance function to get a Bernstein basis quartic polynomial.

4. differentiate to get a Bernstein basic cubic.

5. solve the roots of the cubic numerically in the range 0 to 1: either Newton's or clipping or some other hybrid numerical method. A good reference is [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson%27s_polynomial

[1] Shape Interrogation for Computer Aided Design and Manufacture by Nichola M. Patrikalakis and Takashi Maekawa

Post reply on HN