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Be prolific

chrismytton.com

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Re: Be prolific

#31

Post by melvinroest »

donquichotte wrote: post #29
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 ve…

Need an accountability partner? I know how it is. While I'm not looking for improving my guitar skills, if you need a strict drill sergeant (that doesn't shout :P), I'm available and for free.

For the first month ;-)

Consider it an experiment, for science ^^

Re: Be prolific

#32

Post by __jf__ »

_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…

Yep that pottery class also comes up as an anecdote in “Art and Fear: Observations on the perils and rewards of artmaking”:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...

Re: Be prolific

#33

Post by kstenerud »

ajuc wrote: post #17
saberdancer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names. If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.

Unix vs Multix. Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux. Spring vs EJB. Rest vs Soap vs CORBA. C vs Algol. It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.

But this can also backfire:

- C++

- CMake

- PHP

- Postscript

And it can work well:

- TeX

- Git (not the later additions)

Re: Be prolific

#34

Post by throw149102 »

I realize this is a silly criticism, but it's strange that the author would write about how it's valuable to make a lot of stuff but then to only write 11 sentences about the topic. It seems like it would be much better way to demonstrate the point if the author wrote 100 pages about producing more work/art/code, without any rhyme or reason or editing. After all, the thesis is "Quantity leads to quality", why not just do that?

Of course, I appreciate concise writing and if it were 100 unedited rambling pages it would never be posted on HN or read by anyone. But admitting that seems to be antithetical to the entire point of the blogpost. It just seems like the article doesn't even believe in the idea. It also feels like there wasn't a whole lot of thought put into the post, and I guess that's evidenced by the fact that the art class anecdote doesn't have a source.

The blogpost also ignores all of the issues related to being prolific. Imagine a would-be-weightlifter who has awful form, but does a ton of reps. Not only is their exercise near worthless, it could be potentially dangerous. Or in music, where you could accidentally continually practice a bad habit instead of taking the time to find a mentor and learn how to practice correctly. In software, you could potentially produce something that is buggy and insecure by default. If the code were then included as a dependency in larger projects it could be a cause for a security disaster. I think there's more to high-quality work/practice than just doing it more often, even if that ends up being the most important part of getting good at something.

Re: Be prolific

#35

Post by meheleventyone »

ajuc wrote: post #17
saberdancer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names. If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.

Unix vs Multix. Plan 9 and GNU Herd vs Linux. Spring vs EJB. Rest vs Soap vs CORBA. C vs Algol. It's easier to do something simple and iterate on it than to do something perfect from the start.

That's a different idea though.

Rather the whole point here is that when learning it's better to focus on quantity over quality AND by doing so that quality will naturally be better. The parent is looking for examples of this latter idea.

Re: Be prolific

#36

Post by meheleventyone »

saberdancer wrote: post #12
lqet wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an article discussing this: https://medium.com/swlh/the-science-backed-secret-to-rapidly... > On the first day of the class, the ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the class, he announced, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. > The works of highest quality, the most beautiful and creative desi…

It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names. If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.

It should be obvious to most people that it's trivially true that practice helps you improve skills that require manual dexterity.

I also think it's highly likely the anecdote is supposed to be illustrative rather than literal. IMO it's meant to be advice to students not to fret about how perfect their work is and that with time it will improve. It's just been distorted by the "one quick hack" culture of self improvement.

Re: Be prolific

#37

Post by weareallcowards »

tsjq wrote: post #22
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."

Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview:

>Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time."

>I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all.

And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through hundreds of takes to get a stunt just right.

Re: Be prolific

#38

Post by quickthrower2 »

Anecdotal: I’ve been helping people a bit recently on the free code camp forum and I believe in quantity. The more I help the more I learn. Half the time I learn why someone gets stuck, the other half I’m actually wrong and I learn where I got stuck!

Re: Be prolific

#39

Post by anonytrary »

alltakendamned wrote: post #3

While "practice makes perfect" is not a very new idea, it is still nice to be reminded about it from time to time.

There are a lot of ways to put it, like "no success without failures". He's making the additional point that it's hard to know if you have failed unless you shared your work. I needed to hear it again also.

Re: Be prolific

#40

Post by quickthrower2 »

polskibus wrote: post #25
sudhirj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometime the “business” conspires against that though: in fact depending on the business model it might be a threat
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