If I can only send you a meme, answering your question "what it is that's stopping you from coding". Coding is just a part of it.
Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
311–316 of 316 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
#312Because Coding is not Working. Coding is not Planning. Coding is not Being Efficient. Coding is not Accomplishing Goals. Coding is not Saving Money. Coding is not Gaining Customers. I am getting paid to get things done in a good manner. If I wanted to have a house built for me, I would not expect to pay somebody and immediately have them start laying bricks without them looking at the land, taking soil samples, sketc…
Solid. Mind if I sum it up? Coding is a means, not an ends. Working hard is easy. Working smart is hard.
I think you got that backwards.
Working hard can become very cumbersome and/or annoying to deal with from a team perspective if you don't align with your team/customers/stakeholders/etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
#313Because Coding is not Working. Coding is not Planning. Coding is not Being Efficient. Coding is not Accomplishing Goals. Coding is not Saving Money. Coding is not Gaining Customers. I am getting paid to get things done in a good manner. If I wanted to have a house built for me, I would not expect to pay somebody and immediately have them start laying bricks without them looking at the land, taking soil samples, sketc…
Look up "tracer bullets" in the Pragmatic Programmer. Basically you create an end-to-end working system that capture just enough functionality to work, then you show the user and use their feedback to adjust your "aim" for the next version. Rinse and repeat. I've tried this and worked pretty well.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
#314I took a temporary break from leisure-time coding, in order to finish writing my book on drawing algorithmic art with Go: https://leanpub.com/generative-art-in-golang
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally think that if I can't find a good name for a thing, I don't actually know what it does yet, so Im not ready to code it. I, j, and k have clear definitions as basis vectors, so they can be used, but I don't think I'd ever call a variable foo or bar
Use an APL keyboard and you'll have more options. https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=95872.0 I do think we need a modern hacking keyboard though.
(I know this is going to date me.) I used APL before and during college on a terminal with a type ball. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2741) APL is a great language.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
#316Because Coding is not Working. Coding is not Planning. Coding is not Being Efficient. Coding is not Accomplishing Goals. Coding is not Saving Money. Coding is not Gaining Customers. I am getting paid to get things done in a good manner. If I wanted to have a house built for me, I would not expect to pay somebody and immediately have them start laying bricks without them looking at the land, taking soil samples, sketc…
This is a bad analogy. Coding is closer to writing a book than building a house. The faster you start hacking prototypes the better. As long as you are ready to throw virtually all of it away. Most of you assumptions during planning are wrong anyway so there is little point in planning too much.
The worst thing that happened to coding is business culture with design docs, architecture docs, whatever docs all coming before a prototype is written. This is how you end up with "enterprise grade" garbage.
The best way to create a good code base is to write it inside out a few times over. Documents ain't gonna help you.