The two stages of successful project development:
1. Make a functional prototype.
2. Decide that's good enough anyway and go do something else.
Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
121–130 of 159 posts
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had someone reject my code that improved/regularized half a dozen instances of a domain object we had, where they were showing up in code paths I cared about. He said there’s dozens of these, don’t submit this unless you fix them all.
I had something similar but convinced the other person the rest of the work can be done later. Then the person went ahead and did it despite the other instances having no use/value. Go figure. I guess having consistency has some value to argue the other side. I tend to be extremely flexible in terms of allowing different ways of doing things but some seem to confuse form with function insisting on some "perfection" i…
Consistency reduces the mental cost of acquiring and maintaining an understanding of a system. In a real sense, moving from one approach to two different approaches, even if one of them is slightly better than the original one, can be a downgrade.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#123Built a 5 startups and overthinking can killed the most of them I'd spend weeks on researching instead of just shipping the self story hit me hard sometimes you just want to build the ugly version 1 st.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#124[dead]
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s how I do side projects.
I think this is the definition of side projects. Like, if you stay focused, is it even really a side project? Which is why my 2d top down sprite-based rpg now has a 3d procedural animation engine, a procedural 3d character generator with automagic rigging, a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!) a pixel art editor, a 2d procedural animation engine u…
"You might wonder why a 2d game needs 3d procedural animation, well..."
To produce better looking assets for the 2D top down world?
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#126Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#127Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
Lmao accurate
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#128The fact that the author was confident enough to start the article with a picture of the bins they made and they include seemingly 3x the same thing (oats) and an entire container of ice cream cones, while the only actual ingredient they have is flour and its at the end, makes me question the validity of their argument
What? Who cares what food he stores in them?
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#129Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
Mine was more:
Day 1: we aim to demonstrate the role of myosin II in the initiation of adhesions in migrating fibroblasts
Day 1047: we aim to get one preparation of fibroblasts to express GFP-myosin and survive long enough to film, just one, come on, please, twenty cells is enough, is that too much to ask
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#130Our CEO at Rec Room put this a way I really like, "Teams are always telling me they wish they did shorter projects. I've almost never heard a team say, 'we wish we delayed launch, did something more complex, polished more'" I don't think it holds in 100% of situations but I do think if you're going to make an error one way or the other, I'd rather do something smaller and release too early than do something bigger an…
> I've almost never heard a team say, 'we wish we delayed launch, did something more complex, polished more'"
We must run in very different circles, but IME this just strains credulity.