The Joy of Small Projects
schroer.ca
The Joy of Small Projects
1–10 of 103 posts
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#2I've worked on simple projects, but nothing I would consider small in the sense that I had them done in a matter of hours. But it is satisfying having a project come together in terms of completion, even more so when you reap the benefits of its use. The one that comes to mind for me would be the static site generator I built for my site, something I spent some time working on as I continued to use it, and tweak it for my needs.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#3I can barely finish a leetcode hard in a few hours, let alone something I would call a project. Still, this is an inspiring approach to tackling day to day work in incremental micro-projects.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#4This is delightful and well-stated. I don't think a timeline is necessary, but I do think a sense of urgency "get the prototype done as cleanly and quickly as possible" is helpful. Create an exhibition of the smallest novel component. And there you have it, progress.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#5Meh... someone of us like the depth that comes from longer-term projects.
Don't get me wrong, I've taken art classes that taught me to appreciate smaller, shorter things. And I think it's important to take that spirit into longer-term projects. But I think there's just a lot more "small" projects these days, what with the combination of APIs, funding, hackathon culture in engineering, and prototype culture in design. The pendulum has gone all the way to the end. Which is fine too, but some of us are going to want to go the other way.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#6I can barely finish a leetcode hard in a few hours, let alone something I would call a project. Still, this is an inspiring approach to tackling day to day work in incremental micro-projects.
Personally I find leetcode boring because it's not something that would motivate you to see finished; it doesn't have a "real" purpose, maybe trying to build something concrete (a little game, a little web app, whatever) might bring more motivation.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#7Ok, maybe. Examples would help, though. Specifically: describing the process that goes from the big dream to the smallest implementation feasible in an afternoon.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#8Last year I participated in the advent of code challenges. I remember a puzzle from day 16 [1], which took an afternoon or more .
The idea is really great, however it seems quite hard to solve interesting problems in this short timeframe.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#9I can barely finish a leetcode hard in a few hours, let alone something I would call a project. Still, this is an inspiring approach to tackling day to day work in incremental micro-projects.
Personally I find leetcode boring because it's not something that would motivate you to see finished; it doesn't have a "real" purpose, maybe trying to build something concrete (a little game, a little web app, whatever) might bring more motivation.
Same for me. All these things like Project Euler leave me cold: I'd rather learn something new on the way to a tangible endpoint, even if it's a janky PoS that I never look at again and lose when I don't bother to copy it to a new hard drive.
Re: The Joy of Small Projects
#10I like the ethos behind this post; I've been struggling to finish projects for years, I get desmotivated, jump into another thing, don't finish it, come back after months now lost again, advance a little bit, drop it after a weekend, repeat, etc.
I will try to use the framework presented here but I'm not sure exactly how to apply it, for example the project I've been meaning to finish is what I call a very dumb compiler (parse a very simple language and emit x86_64 assembly code but without any optimizations, the most naive thing that will work).
It's hard to think how to reduce this problem to something I could do over a weekend; I have to do a lot of research, thinking and trial and error because I'm not an expert in writing parsers or anything like that.
I feel like this might only work in certain occasions.