Yes: "Stop Starting and Start Finishing"
just write it down somewhere in plain sight.
Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
351–360 of 372 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#352Have you tried journaling? It lets you get ideas out (adding or remixing ideas from the previous days), without investing in getting a project up, writing code, etc. A lot of times, for me, I just want to explore an idea and I'm not actually interested in working through it. But if I spend enough days journaling an idea and I'm still interested in it, then I go for it. The other thing that's helped me is realizing th…
Re your first paragraph: What's funny is that I get almost the same effect by avoiding writing ideas down. I find letting an idea sit and stew in my head to be a good vetting process. If I forget an idea, that's a feature of the system, not a bug. If an idea survives for a while and I find myself coming back to it often, then after a month of it being an idea I might act on it. At that point the idea is a lot less ne…
For me, writing a thing down gives me the option to forget it. People are different I suppose.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
"maybe you already got what you came for." As someone who frequently starts projects and doesn't finish them, I've wondered if the part I enjoy about the project is the dreaming about what could be. That little rush you get when a new idea is upon you and it's all you can think about for x days. Doing the initial research and formulating a plan. This is a dopamine rush for me. The feeling of being laser focused for t…
As someone who tends to do the same, I don't think this is a good description of what is happening. The way I view it is that any project has the same progression of initial excitement, frenzied work and determination, discovery of the real scope, the descent into the Valley of Despair as you continue to wrestle with the problem and then the fork in the road where you either give up and abandon the work or you persev…
Ya, sometimes I follow this path as well. I like how you put it.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#354I find that if random people on the internet like to use what I'm working on, that's the most motivating thing. Think of it like fishing for startups. If you get a lot of nibbles on a particular idea that you test out, best to keep going if it's working, provided that's it's the best idea you have. If random strangers are happy to get on the phone with you to ask you questions about whether they can use your product because they want to learn more and have a problem, that's a good sign too.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance you've written about this side project and the areas you learned about and how to figured those things out?
This is probably the first and only time it was mentioned in public. I do have a private bitbucket graveyard where it resides. Oh and this was done when mongodb was still a thing, so I have some of that going in there for finding sparse stock correlation matrices. And ruby was everywhere at the time, so the bank interface was created in watir instead of puppeteer.
Interesting. I've been working on automating some personal finance Google Sheet stuff trying to use watir to automate pulling stuff from Mint. Did you find watir useful for things like this? Or would you say there's ultimately better options for a personal Rails app?
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably the first and only time it was mentioned in public. I do have a private bitbucket graveyard where it resides. Oh and this was done when mongodb was still a thing, so I have some of that going in there for finding sparse stock correlation matrices. And ruby was everywhere at the time, so the bank interface was created in watir instead of puppeteer.
Interesting. I've been working on automating some personal finance Google Sheet stuff trying to use watir to automate pulling stuff from Mint. Did you find watir useful for things like this? Or would you say there's ultimately better options for a personal Rails app?
google sheets is awesome, they even let you reply to rudimentary get requests and define your own functions with google script. I think it is a hidden gem.
Watir lets you host your own headless firefox or google chrome on a cheap server thanks to the headless gem. All headless does is to start Xvfb and let you execute the browser in it.
What I really like in watir's interface is the wait_for functionality which you can sprinkle everywhere in order to wait until a button or a dropdown is actually rendered by javascript so you can click on it once it is queryable.
These days I use websockets and chrome puppeteer protocol to talk to the browser. It is somewhat faster and more robust than the chromiumdriver, but if I had to use watir again, I wouldn't mind it.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd bet a few dollars that this is the most common answer. A little piece of anecdata, being stuck, jobless and confidentless due to too much of this dopamine rush theory, i did propose to write something for my 'boss', at a food store, a little single user vue app [0]. a few conclusion : - i did actually deliver something functional (for a change) - i still had twenty thousand dreamy ideas (as noted in a lengthy TOD…
I feel so related to the third point.
I think it's a subtle but important one actually, the dopamine rush is a bit a self pleasuring quest, so thinking for others is already a step in the right direction
That's also an idea I keep having about general adult life, career and happiness. Youth is all about intense self satisfaction, but running this race too long is a dead end, and it should be hinted that working for other citizen is actually a good thing for you (because it avoids this dead end)
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#358I’m just like you. I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me but I think about it differently now and use it more to my advantage. Worth a r…
"maybe you already got what you came for." As someone who frequently starts projects and doesn't finish them, I've wondered if the part I enjoy about the project is the dreaming about what could be. That little rush you get when a new idea is upon you and it's all you can think about for x days. Doing the initial research and formulating a plan. This is a dopamine rush for me. The feeling of being laser focused for t…
I like this too. At the same time is this only making you feel better and not addressing the problem?
You definitely dont want to beat yourself over losing interest in side project. This is something many people including myself do, especially when side projects are a hobby. But if you want the side project to be more than 'a hobby' you still need to address staying power.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#359I’m just like you. I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me but I think about it differently now and use it more to my advantage. Worth a r…
I'm in the same boat. Another thing I've realized is that while my interest may jump between half a dozen different things, if I just let it run its course, it tends to circle around. I.e. I don't leave an endless trail of projects in my wake, I revisit different ones as that interest rekindles. But before I realized this, I would be really hard on myself about switching, trying to force my interest to sit still, which really just killed my interest in all of them.
Bottom line: don't try and pin down your interest, open up to it and let it run its course. The course may not always make sense but it knows what it's doing.
Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?
#360I would suppose this is a very common struggle among IT professionals. A few things that have helped me, some of them already mentioned in this thread:
- simply don't do it; prioritize more important ideas.
- start smaller - some ideas are just too ambitious, try to come up with the smallest end product that is still useful.
- don't talk about it - just by talking about what you are planning to build gets you a small dopamine release, discouraging you from finishing the project.
- scratch your own itch - create something that will help solving a problem you face frequently.
- get other people involved - invite other people to collaborate building or just using it so you have people to hold you accountable.