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Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

kevinlynagh.com

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Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#141

Post by shimman »

tyleo wrote: post #32

Our 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…

Yes, why would teams of a company prefer shorter less risky projects to look better in front of the person that controls their livelihoods on whether they become homeless or die due to lack of health insurance next sprint?

Totally realistic and honest outlooks that are replicable throughout all swaths of industry really.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#143

Post by chamomeal »

drivers99 wrote: post #60
dgb23 wrote: post #47

I'm _exactly_ in this situation right now with a side project. It's in a field that I have little experience with (Information Retrieval). So there is obviously prior art that I could learn from or even integrate with. This article motivates me further to learn things by focusing on building my own and peek into prior art as I go, when I'm stuck or need ideas. Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach…

> Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time. That was also on my mind thanks to the documentary. Then I followed up with "Easy made Simple" and "Hammock Driven Development", and it makes me want to learn Clojure. Clojure documentary on CultRepo channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

If you want an irresistibly productive usage for clojure, check out babashka. It’s what made clojure stick for me.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#144

Post by isjdkwjdown »

tra3 wrote: post #34

In one of his speeches, Obama said "Better is good". I think about this a lot. It feels like better compounds over time, too. Small improvements add up. From experience, nothing new is perfect the first go round, so sitting around trying to come up with a perfect design is counterproductive because there's no such thing. "impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

> "impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

Don’t know where this is from but it’s like saying “when you stop work in progress, progress is stopped”, I mean, sure. That’s how things go, but why even say such an obvious fact of life?

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#145

Post by Ifkaluva »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #14
bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, 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…

I think it’s the opposite—you start out bright eyed and busy tailed thinking you will do something big over the next five years…

You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their results were so bad they couldn’t publish.

Then in the end you have done a tiny increment over the state of the art, and you want to persuade the PhD committee this is enough and they should let you graduate.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#148

Post by appplication »

lukan wrote: post #125
amarant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think this is what factorio did for their assets (2d sprites from 3d models, not proc gen)

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#149

Post by drivers99 »

chamomeal wrote: post #143
drivers99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time. That was also on my mind thanks to the documentary. Then I followed up with "Easy made Simple" and "Hammock Driven Development", and it makes me want to learn Clojure. Clojure documentary on CultRepo channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

If you want an irresistibly productive usage for clojure, check out babashka. It’s what made clojure stick for me.

Oh that does look awesome!

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#150

Post by x______________ »

amarant wrote: post #80
richardw wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

> a population simulator that would put Europa Universalis to shame if I ever get around to finishing it (ha!)

I believe the answer is buried in this submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902525

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish (matthewbrunelle.com) 228 points by speckx 12 hours ago | flag | hide | 122 comments

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