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On finishing projects

alexreichert.com

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Re: On finishing projects

#41

Post by nilirl »

My biggest tip: Have a system you can rely on even when you're struggling. Take the magic out of progress.

Use curiosity and excitement when you can but don't let them be the only way you can work on something.

Some practical strategies I've written about:

- How to prevent stagnation while building products alone [0]

- Multi-Perspective Note-Taking: Mastering focus as a solo-developer [1]

[0] https://www.idiotlamborghini.com/articles/how_to_prevent_sta...

[1] https://www.idiotlamborghini.com/articles/mastering_focus_as...

Re: On finishing projects

#42

Post by mannylopez »

andrewstuart wrote: post #18

There was a post on HN recently about building software for yourself - forget the possible audience of millions. If you focus on yourself as the end user then the whole thing becomes easier. I couldn't find it after a brief search. Maybe someone else remembers it.

Maybe “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal”?

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Re: On finishing projects

#43

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

wonger_ wrote: post #26
cloverich wrote: post #5

I resonate strongly with this. I found something pretty simple thats been helping me lately though. I uhh, i just force myself to keep working on it until its done. Grind it out. Work on it especially when i dont want to. Ditch those little relaxing moments for it. Wake up early to find time for it. Its torture. And also therapeutic. I see the incompleteness of my original idea, or plan. I see that the things i decla…

+1 to being selective and ruthlessly deleting time-draining ideas. I'm not sure I can force myself to keep working, though. Self-imposed deadlines don't help me either. It seems like a willpower problem, like going to the gym. What's helped me is making projects alongside a small group of fellow programmers. Seems like the author has done something similar with a hackers co-op chat and with Recurse. External accounta…

Where do you find these fellow programmers? Are they working on the project with you, or their own things?

I work with oodles of software developers and almost none of them program on the side.

Re: On finishing projects

#44

Post by Aleksdev »

I don’t want to come off as mean and spoil the article but the author writes he can’t get anything done and the strategies that might help him with finishing things is..

“1) writing a spec (i.e. a plan) upfront, and 2) timeboxing the project by giving myself a deadline.”

Isn’t this just agile? I’m pretty sure every developer already does this, it’s kind of the whole strategy for completing any project.

Not sure what the point of this article was. He could have wrote “make a sprint and stick to it”

Re: On finishing projects

#45

Post by vaylian »

nilirl wrote: post #41

My biggest tip: Have a system you can rely on even when you're struggling. Take the magic out of progress. Use curiosity and excitement when you can but don't let them be the only way you can work on something. Some practical strategies I've written about: - How to prevent stagnation while building products alone [0] - Multi-Perspective Note-Taking: Mastering focus as a solo-developer [1] [0] https://www.idiotlamborg…

Very philosophical texts. These are good reads. Thanks for sharing!

Re: On finishing projects

#46

Post by pcblues »

Here's just a little silly story from my own life of unfinished projects. I wanted to make a sort of shazam where I could hum the tune of a classical piece of music and find out what it was. I hacked together an enormous midi database of classical music with a couple of libraries to take a hum and turn it into midi notes in order to find the pattern in the database based on the difference between each note in a melody of a classical piece as an identifying key (pun intended). As a really bad singer, I couldn't hold a note, but you can imagine the work required to get this to actually work.

The amusing part was that I told a prospective software development employer about the project because it was consuming a fair part of my life at the time and showed an interest in software development in my spare time. They asked, "Did it work?" I said, "Nope"

I didn't get the job but we both had a laugh about it during the interview.

Re: On finishing projects

#47

Post by FrankyHollywood »

turtledragonfly wrote: post #15
cloverich wrote: post #5

I resonate strongly with this. I found something pretty simple thats been helping me lately though. I uhh, i just force myself to keep working on it until its done. Grind it out. Work on it especially when i dont want to. Ditch those little relaxing moments for it. Wake up early to find time for it. Its torture. And also therapeutic. I see the incompleteness of my original idea, or plan. I see that the things i decla…

> I start making more realistic plans and exit points because im not a masochist. Or, you start to enjoy the pain, because you enjoy the result. But then your mind does its illogical associative thing and you start to just enjoy the pain on its own. Now you're a masochist! I jest, but only some. Ask me how I know ...

How do you know? :)

Re: On finishing projects

#49

Post by vouaobrasil »

I consider myself very productive. But I don't care about finished projects. The key is that some get finished. I naturally let projects languish as soon as they lose interest for me. If I lose interest I feel that it's not worth expending effort against the current to finish it. That's perhaps why I'm terrible in a corporate setting but great as an independent. I hate routine.

Re: On finishing projects

#50

Post by NicoJuicy »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #49

I consider myself very productive. But I don't care about finished projects. The key is that some get finished. I naturally let projects languish as soon as they lose interest for me. If I lose interest I feel that it's not worth expending effort against the current to finish it. That's perhaps why I'm terrible in a corporate setting but great as an independent. I hate routine.

The hard thing is staying focused on finishing things.

New projects are always nice and "productive", because it's fine. It's meeting the end goal that is harder.

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