Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to never complete anything

ewanvalentine.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 220 posts

Re: How to never complete anything

#151

Post by reledi »

It's okay not to ship personal projects. No one's really holding you accountable for that. Look at it this way, unfinished personal projects still give you value because you might still be using it in its incomplete state, and you learned something when making it. As you become a more experienced engineer, it's common to have more unfinished personal projects because you have difficulty approaching it with a hacker mindset where you throw all best practices out the window and get it working as quickly as possible. Accept it and try not to lose sleep over it.

The problem is when this behaviour crosses over into your professional life, because you're not delivering value to your customers quickly enough and as a result you'll either get sacked or the company can go bust. Having someone else to keep you in line works great, it doesn't even need to be a Product Manager or Product Owner. And if you don't have someone else to keep you disciplined, then you better work hard on improving this area where you're lacking. Write down ideas on paper for example and ruthlessly prioritise and prune them every morning. Sayings like "work on what's highest priority", "do the least amount of effort that results in the greatest value", "keep it simple", "reduce scope", "you aren't gonna need it", "defer nice to haves", and so on are things we hear so often because it really is good advice that you should follow.

Re: How to never complete anything

#152

Post by curun1r »

I have this same problem. My finish rate is abysmal, but I've actually finished a few.

I've realized that finishing a project is roughly 10% exploration another 20% getting to working and at least 70% polish. The exploration phase is very enjoyable and it's what keeps me hopping from project to project. Occasionally, the enjoyment will phase will encourage me to keep plugging away at it until I get to working. This is the minority of my projects, but it happens naturally to some extent. But I rarely put in the time and work to do that other, much larger bit to get to a done state. Because that part is actually work and it's not fun.

But what I've discovered in looking at my projects that actually got to done is that there's one thing that, for me, leads me to finish...having a social pressure. The projects that I've discussed with friends and gotten them excited about are the ones that I finish. My attention will wane and I'll drop it for a bit, but then I'll have a conversation where someone asks what what the status is and I'll pick it up and work more. And if that repeats enough, I finish. The best case scenario is getting someone excited enough to actually code with me on a project. In those cases, we usually get to done pretty quickly.

I think this is why being a solo founder is so difficult. You're going to run into difficult stretches and you'll want to focus on something else. It's a very rare person that can continually return their focus to a single problem, even in the face of adversity. But if you've got someone else to steer your focus back, you can keep working long enough to succeed.

So here's my advice to a coder who's never finished. For your next side project, when you get the inspiration, instead of immediately sitting down at a keyboard, contact a friend, go out for drinks and tell them about your project. Better yet, get a group of friends and discuss it. Get them excited about it and let them know that you're excited about it. Only after that step should you start coding.

Re: How to never complete anything

#154

Post by ernsheong »

superasn wrote: post #53

I struggled through the same thing once I started with TDD. I've never had problems completing and shipping new products (a solo founder i launched 20 saas sites last year) but after reading dozens of documents about why TDD is an absolute must for any serious programmer my hubris got the best of me and I decided that I too will join the bandwagon. Boy, was i wrong.. Maybe for big teams it is a must but for soloprene…

For a small team you should probably only TDD the most critical stuff, and not everything. Stuff that has huge paybacks, critical code. Generally I have been reverting to coding first, unless in scenarios where I waste more time trying to manually test it.

Re: How to never complete anything

#155

Post by ernsheong »

I've frequently been defeated myself because the project size was too large and too ambitious. Being a perfectionist also really doesn't help, but it's my nature. So I've learnt to instead focus on a wayyy smaller project, and I'm making more progress than ever because well, the finishing line is much nearer.

Also, using Pivotal Tracker or some agile tool to track stories gives me a kick to doing things. Commit to a small number stories per defined sprint period and get it done.

Re: How to never complete anything

#156

Post by sdenton4 »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #54
vinceguidry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh believe me, I did try. Moved in with a business cofounder and started working on an idea. We squabbled over a lot of things before I realized that it was a marriage and not a transaction, and what I wanted was more transactional. So I bailed and got a job. I still talk with the guy and fill out estimates for his potential clients whenever he wants. We'll eventually hack out a working professional relationship and…

> Maybe your answer to this is to "just work harder." To that I just have to say, 'absolutely not'. I said "ship" it. not work harder. You can even ship something you built in a couple of hours. It IS ok to not ship every single project you work on, but it is not ok to be proud of how you never ship. Personally in terms of "learning" I learned 90% of what I have learned AFTER shipping. You think you are learning but…

People are allowed to have different goals. You should step back and learn to respect that.

Re: How to never complete anything

#157

Post by brazzledazzle »

This hurt to read because it's something I've recognized in myself and I've been thinking about how to solve it for a while now. Looking back it was a habit I started long before I ever touched a line of code–I used to sketch and paint a lot but would never finish a piece. Analyzing that I realized I was chasing a "high" that you get from exploring new ideas and even when I wanted to finish something I made it incredibly difficult by not having even a loose idea of what "done" looked like. I think having the "finished" figured out (even if it changes) might help a lot because anything that makes things harder once you're past the fun part is a multiplier for demotivation.

It does make me feel a little better knowing I'm not alone in my shame though. And hearing about other's solutions is really helpful too.

Re: How to never complete anything

#158

Post by watwut »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #112
watwut wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I said "ship" it. not work harder. You can even ship something you built in a couple of hours. " I did that and gained nothing from it. I don't mean it as a complain, more like reality check - most of the time you don't magically learn by shipping whatever you done in few hours.

That's because "shipping" doesn't mean just posting it online randomly where nobody finds out. It's like saying "I have a Twitter account and nobody cares what I say, I never get a single reply or a like. Btw I have 0 followers". Shipping means getting it out there AND see what people think of it. If you at least tried to do that, you would have probably learned something. Even one person looking at your thing and gi…

People seen it, you assumed wrong. Some people give good quality feedback, some people give bad quality feedback and I really did not gained all that much. I was ok with not gaining much, I am not complaining. People do and don't do things for variety reasons, even one human has usually multiple contributing reasons for everything. If you assume single reason for most people, you are likely to be wrong.

Lastly, random strangers on the internet telling you that you did build shit does not mean you did built shit. Nor them telling you that you did something awesome means you did something awesome. They may be right or wrong, they may be trolls, they may want to feel you good, they may have had bad day.

The feedback may be useless simply because they have different goals that you had. Especially in situation where your goal was to ship whatever is possible withing x hours (topic of this thread) and the public it is a shit cause they would accept something equivalent to days of work. Which is alright as far as I am concerned, but hardly a learning experience.

Re: How to never complete anything

#159

Post by mattnewton »

majewsky wrote: post #92
gerlv wrote: post #26

Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…

"Ship daily" only works with web applications. If I were to ship my applications daily (or rather: each day where there occur changes), I would just be compiling packages all the time. (Before you ask: This cannot be automated further. I will not give my GPG key to some automation to sign the packages with.)

Surely you can give it to another box in your house that tries to build on commit all day?

Re: How to never complete anything

#160

Post by quadcore »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #49

I finished my side project a couple of years ago, released it, and then found I was able to quit my Python webdev job and go full time making video games. The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXl8lDrxn8 ) and that takes a lot of temptation to do what the OP is writing about, rewriting stuff in Haskell for example. The interesting bit when it comes to side…

Offtopic: great music in the video, have you done it yourself?
Post reply on HN