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Be prolific

chrismytton.com

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Re: Be prolific

#21

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

shannifin wrote: post #16

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback lo…

That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product.

The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about.

So balance, is, indeed, critical.

Re: Be prolific

#22

Post by tsjq »

shannifin wrote: post #16

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback lo…

Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

Re: Be prolific

#23

Post by bluetomcat »

shannifin wrote: post #16

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback lo…

High quantity being "better" than low quantity is a wrong way of framing the problem. A more practical framing would be – avoid boredom, stay in flow and be fascinated with the work you do, review your work constantly and look for improvements.

Re: Be prolific

#24

Post by sriku »

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #11

When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insi…

Absolutely this! Another way I express this to my colleagues is to consider that Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. All of that is typically taught in a semester's graduate level course today.

The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.

Re: Be prolific

#25

Post by polskibus »

sudhirj wrote: post #9
polskibus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad1. In my opinion it's the variety of problems an engineer has solved that matters. There are plenty of crud developers that are helpless whenever a more complex problem occurs, even though they did hundreds of crud pages in their life.

This applies only if they’re learning. Learning devs who do 100s of CRUD pages will have a DSL and metaprogramming toolkit by the time they’re done. Those who don’t learn will do the same thing, like an artist making 100 copies of their own first painting, each copy more faithful than the last. Better to make a 100 versions of the same subject, each one better than the last.

Many of them don't have a crud toolkit even after 100s of pages done, at least that's what I see.

Re: Be prolific

#27

Post by arh68 »

_Microft wrote: post #4

I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…

I believe the ceramics bit is fabricated, and it was actually a photography class. But it hardly matters. It's an interesting perspective, details aside.

Re: Be prolific

#28

Post by terse_malvolio »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #20

What's the point of these posts? It's an opinion based on nothing else than a hypothetical anecdote. Is it motivational posts for HN readers--is this what "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" these days?

It feeds the hustle mindset getting you all pumped up so you can be prolific by writing about it, saving it to your bookmarks, sharing to your social media, and assuring yourself that you, too, can be prolific. You're not a total failure! It's a great feeling.

It could also be some sort of operation where artificially generated content and comments are put out to try to train an AI further or try to probe reactionary sentiment over specific key issues.

But that's as much intellectual gratification I'll self-administer momentarily.

Re: Be prolific

#29

Post by donquichotte »

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #11

When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insi…

To improve, busy work is not enough - some kind of quality control is needed to provide feedback, like mentioned in the "Share your Work" paragraph.

I have been playing guitar for 28 years and barely improved in the past 15 years - after a teenage burst of disciplined, daily drills with metronome and recording a lot of music, I still regularly doodle and learn new songs, but it is just not enough to give me escape velocity from the current plateau.

Re: Be prolific

#30

Post by _Microft »

arh68 wrote: post #27
_Microft wrote: post #4

I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…

I believe the ceramics bit is fabricated, and it was actually a photography class. But it hardly matters. It's an interesting perspective, details aside.

I found a lecturer referring to a pottery study and sent them an email asking if they could point me to the actual study. Let's see and wait.
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