I'm 5 years into the programming business and my own projects are just starting to get into a usable state in a reasonable amount of time. Finishing things feels a bit further away still.
Thanks for the article.
Finish your stuff
141–150 of 177 posts
Re: Finish your stuff
#142Am I the only one that really hates the carpenter analogy? As someone who does woodworking on the side of my programming, there's a million reasons why it's a terrible way to think about software development. The chair doesn't have supported platforms, new security issues, or the need to be updated so that people keep buying the same chair. Someone else isn't going to have to come along later to maintain the chair an…
>The chair doesn't have supported platforms, new security issues, or the need to be updated so that people keep buying the same chair. IoT will change all of that ;)
Chair Change Log
* (0.1) - Can sit on chair
* (0.1.1) - Chair holds person who sits on it
* (0.2) - Can detect person sits in chair
* (0.2.1-hotfix) - Reject fake 'sits'
* (0.3) - Determine weight of person sitting on chair!
...Re: Finish your stuff
#143I can't think of a piece of software I wrote and feel finished, not because I abandoned them, but because I stop improving them when they are good enough for the task. Maybe it's just me but I never feel a software is finished. You can at least refactor it or add new funcionality, improve speed/readability/reliability until the end of time. It's like writing a book. You can always rephrase, add new characters improve…
In the end though, readability/maintainability end up being at odds with features/speed. I like to think about the hypothetical programmer that has to take over my project ten years from now. Is the value of a new feature worth their pain and suffering? Is my project going to be too painful to keep alive?
I think the projects at http://suckless.org have taken maintainability to a really inspirational level.
Re: Finish your stuff
#144I find it irritating when people look at some of my projects on Github and consider then "abandoned" because they haven't had any commits in a year or two. They're not abandoned: they're finished. They do what they're designed to do, and I use them regularly. Outstanding issues may exist for feature requests that I don't need, or for minor bugs that won't occur in anything but obscure edge cases that don't apply to t…
Maybe your README intro should communicate this? Most of us are not accustomed to something on Github being "finished", so a project where there aren't current commits is unsettling.
Re: Finish your stuff
#145I don't know, lot of interviews I've been to in the past doesn't seem to value the fact that I spent almost 4 years of my life working on a single project (which will never be finished but pretty damn good by now) or that I've been selling and supporting customers with it. A basic memoization algorithm type questions or 'tell me about a time when you...' and I choke every god damn time while a fresh graduate with a C…
"it's important for me to build something that just works first in order to meet project deadline and then optimize afterwards but I guess this is not good for an employee point of view"
That might be because they know that afterwards never comes.
Re: Finish your stuff
#146A couple times today, I found myself in the middle of something and came back to HN to procrastinate. I saw the Finish Your Stuff headline and left to finish what I was doing. I need to have a little banner on top of my computer that says "finish your stuff"
Re: Finish your stuff
#147The only way to "finish" software in the way the author describes is to find or invent an abstraction that is exceptionally powerful and well-designed. It has to give users what they want for a multitude of different use cases without requiring the library to grow to accommodate those use cases. In practice, abstractions this powerful and flexible are almost impossible to create. For example: - the Linux kernel is ba…
Even zlib looks to be a bit more complex than that when doing streams of packet data: http://www.bolet.org/~pornin/deflate-flush-fr.html
There's also stuff like preset dictionaries and so on so string->string is just one part of the abstraction and isn't a full signature. Compression level's another.
zlib's also not competitive in many scenarios, so it's only "done" for limited scope.
Re: Finish your stuff
#148I thought the Unix philosophy embraced the idea of "small tools that do one thing really well." > Please join me in my effort and do finish your projects. Hear, hear. A friend and I hosted a "Finish it! Weekend" once (as opposed to a "Startup Weekend"). The idea was to get people together for one weekend and finish that last 10% or whatever of a project. Sadly we were the only two to show up. (And we both finished ou…
[deleted]
Re: Finish your stuff
#149A couple times today, I found myself in the middle of something and came back to HN to procrastinate. I saw the Finish Your Stuff headline and left to finish what I was doing. I need to have a little banner on top of my computer that says "finish your stuff"
You may find noprocrast feature on HN settings page useful. It is a polite reminder that tells you to go back to work. You can adjust how many minutes you can stay at HN (maxvisit), and when you can come back (minaway).
Re: Finish your stuff
#150"Real artists ship" "if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often I'm sure there are many others, but these ones keep me shipping.
If you're embarrassed by the first version of your product (i.e. suppose it's buggy, or is lacking in it's UI) then it's probably not ready to ship? There is nothing worse than shipping a half-baked product.
I'm embarrassed by the first versions of all of my products. I'm NOT embarrassed by the current versions.
Yes, I shipped. Yes, it was shit. Yes, it got MUCH better after it got real-world use.