Define “finished”.
Oh cool (read FUUUUUCK), I forgot I don’t know how to disable smart quotes on iOS.
Finish your projects
101–110 of 241 posts
Re: Finish your projects
#102Define “finished”. Oh cool (read FUUUUUCK), I forgot I don’t know how to disable smart quotes on iOS.
That's the neat part, you get to define it for yourself.
Re: Finish your projects
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, your post is spot on. Grinding out the last 10% of the boring details while fear starts creeping in and new ideas surface to distract you is exactly what I’ve felt. You’ve codified this in a way that I feel like I can begin to manage it better. Really great post. I’ll incorporate this one into my life going forward.
Thank you for letting me know, that's encouraging for me to hear. Good luck!
One thing we should do while we’re configuring oauth consent screens, verifying domains, and other 10% drudgery is tell ourselves we’re building reusable infrastructure or at least obtaining the knowhow to do so.
Re: Finish your projects
#104Should be finish your project*
Sometimes there's just more interesting stuff to do, or the easy project turned out to be a near impossible slog. Letting go and moving on is a valuable decision instead of digging a deeper hole. That is sunk cost fallacy.
Ie, I tried making a instagram + discord fusion. Instagram image feeds, but to a server of people instead. Turns out it's a ton of work and is worthless unless others adopt it. So it got scrapped after month+ of work.
Re: Finish your projects
#105Commercial software vendors don't even finish their products before shipping what's often aspirational vaporware in the form of a skinned update mechanism. Don't get me wrong; I'm totally in favor of finishing things in the sense of doing the un-fun work of finishing instead of distracting yourself with a fresh set of problems every time you reach the un-fun finishing phase of resolving existing messes. But it's wort…
Commercial software vendors may not finish their products (what even is "finished" when it comes to software?) but they do ship them. How many unfinished hobby projects meet the same fate?
Re: Finish your projects
#106"the things that you love should be the things that you do, and the things that you do should be the things that you love."
-r. b.
Re: Finish your projects
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened as a result of finishing those projects?
One thing: internal satisfaction. External success, too! The biggest one recently was releasing a course on MySQL at https://planetscale.com/mysql-for-developers . It was painful to push that over the finish line, but giving up on it would have been a huge disservice.
Aaron, thank you for this course! I started watching it about a week ago, and I love your teaching style.
I've been using relational databases for years, but my conceptual understanding was never that strong. I hadn't touched MySQL in particular for several years. Your course not only got me back up to speed, but I learned a lot of things I'd never known before.
I love how you organize your lessons, how you make sure to answer the right questions at the right times, and how you prioritize helping the learner build a strong mental model.
I hope you make more content like this in the future.
Re: Finish your projects
#108To take the contrary position: give up. Your project will take far longer than you think, and you will get much less from it than you hope (at least in terms of external validation and rewards). You may feel a horrible pressure to finish it, but you are a free person and can simply choose not to. You can free yourself from this pain without lifting a finger. Go take a walk or bake some cookies instead. If you have th…
Look , 90% of good work / product won’t exist if people all give up because they don’t want to grind and only work if they feel like it . You cannot get rid of grinding in any projects even if you are passionate about it . There are gonna be times or parts of it that you need to grind. No excuse if you choose to be a grown up
I guess that's kind of the point. You don't have to choose to be that kind of grown up.
Re: Finish your projects
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad you still liked it, despite the strong complaints! I hear your feedback, but I don't fully agree with all of it. I do understand the sunk cost fallacy quite well, but thinking about the time committed can be a useful framing to help push past the fear of releasing or drudgery of the last 10%. > If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop te…
Of course I do not ship a lot of personal projects. That’s why they’re personal. I have enough to ship in my day job. Not shipping my personal projects is my prerogative.
Of course that's your prerogative, but their claim still holds true. If you never ship your own projects, you're still a person that never ships.
What you do at your day job doesn't matter, (unless you work for yourself), if you ship while at work, your work is a place that ships. Not you.
Re: Finish your projects
#110To take the contrary position: give up. Your project will take far longer than you think, and you will get much less from it than you hope (at least in terms of external validation and rewards). You may feel a horrible pressure to finish it, but you are a free person and can simply choose not to. You can free yourself from this pain without lifting a finger. Go take a walk or bake some cookies instead. If you have th…
> Go take a walk or bake some cookies instead.
Funny enough, I had few concept projects got un-stuck maybe because of it. Long story short: sometimes it's helpful to leave the project for a few days so you can come back to it from a relatively new perspective. Get a good exercise AND then a good rest helps too, especially when the project is big.