71–80 of 198 posts
Also. Trello. Write a few coding tasks, finish a few tasks. And just keep adding more tasks when you run out of 'what's next!' means you can sit down on your oroject and get quickly up to speed on where you are too. In progress, finished, backlog are he columns I use.
Just ship, baby.
I found that reading it a few years ago really helped me along. Note that of course Beck refers to rules as the thing that hold him back, because as a hardcore TDD'er he likes rules. Substitute "rules" or "best practices" for "fancy editor setup" or "perfect webpack configuration" for the same thing in HN-o-world. Substitute it for whatever you tend to find most important and you have a helpful piece of actionable advice.
Also, I think that this "Just ship it" idea is basically "worse is better" but then inside a single person's mind.
Cut your internet off for a week, go outside and "waste time" a bit more often. Write something for your project with the intent of throwing it away, and then throw it away. Force yourself to build something you "know" is shitty. You might find you actually get it done.
You aren't able to get out of the sketchbook or notes in your over-architecting phase. It is normal. It is a typical developer arc. You are probably around 4-8 years in. - The first 2-3 years are focused, prototype like, just happy it is working phase. Piles of crap code here and a few successes. Underplanning is the key problem with a focus on proving you can do it. - The second phase it the overly architected phase…
Easier said than done perhaps, but getting a new job or doing something you didn't think you would ever do, especially with a good team surrounding you can really push you over that phase and get you to trust your skills.
Leave the comfort zone! Do something that seems too difficult, just do and grind and you will find the methods to blast through any wall ahead of you.
It's more about discipline than having the best methods. Through discipline I learned that I can solve any problem, it just needs work. The solutions are not most of the time the most elegant, but over time those features of the code that stick around get cleaned up and they transform to something beautiful.
A colleague of mine once laughed because I was dumb enough to admit to being a perfectionist. He never saw that he said, which is true. Being a perfectionist doesn't mean perfect results, just never finished the basics so you can move on and polish.
I also recommend
* Quantity always trumps quality.
* the done manifesto
Why do you keep picking up new things rather than finishing things? Because you enjoy picking up new things more than finishing things. And that's totally fine! It's fine to enjoy playing with shiny new toys. It's also fine to enjoy sticking at one boring thing and finishing it. And largely, it's not your choice what you enjoy, it's just one of the many things you rolled up during character generation.
It may be true that sticking at one thing is a better technique for starting a hojillion dollar business. Or it may not - if you weren't such a magpie, how many ideas for hojillion dollar business would you have? And it may be that flitting between things is a better technique for other things - journalism, freelancing, meeting people? However it is, you have a choice between either struggling to do something you're just not suited to, and being miserable, or ditching the shame, doing something that you are suited to, and being happy.
NO! I was guilty of this exact thing, and I still am to some extent. I'm finding that this is exactly the wrong approach. The first thing you need to do is to find someone who cares - find a potential user. Email that person. Tweet at someone who might think this is cool. Write a blog post about your idea - writing encourages critical thinking. Survey your friends to see if they'd like it. Find that group of people somewhere and talk to them somehow. Do they get excited? Are they interested? Do they want something else? Could you turn /that/ into an idea? This isn't the simplest process in the world, but it's damn useful.
This has multiple merits: a) You get immediate feedback on whether your idea is worth something. Most of them probably won't be, and that's okay. But you nip your "shiny things" in the bud this way. b) It gives you other, maybe related, maybe better ideas - helps you refine it. c) You get a potential userbase sooner rather than later, which is a great motivator. Hearing people like your thing is AWESOME. They'll also bug you about updates and stop you from focusing on ultimately inconsequential shit like your editor settings or what your logo should be.
Then sleep on it. Read a book about it. See what others have done. Is it still worth it? After you answer that, now it's time to finally build a prototype, maybe. And setting a goal for user interaction is very helpful - sometimes you can go on a rut where you spend months not shipping anything tangible but trudging through bugs and whatever. This leads to a tunnel of despair where you get no positive external reinforcement ("good job") which leads to burnout. This happened to me and it sucks big time, kills all of your energy and hope. So it's helpful to focus, at least initially, on small, shippable increments.
Ideas should gel over time. The chances any one of us has a perfect idea on the first shot is miniscule. If you have an idea, firing up your editor and starting to build it is the worst thing you could do in terms of time efficiency. Hope this helps, and good luck!
Yoga. That advice may get me downvoted as being off topic, but if you suffer through learning it and practice it 3x per week your situation will improve across the board. Why? Because its physically challenging and you sound like you could use that distraction. It turns your mind off (or at least turns it down). It can be social if you give it time. IMHO,the problem is over-focus on tech and restoring balance in your…
Also daily meditation. 20 minutes a day does wonders to shutting down the mind and seeing things from a completely new angle.
I would say taking care of your health is the number one priority any coder (or human) should have. The amount of hours sitting in front of the computer just get ineffective at some point, for me it is around 4-6 hours a day, then I just don't crank anymore good code and I have to call it a day and do something else.
We should embrace this kind of relaxed work ethics more, than the forced 8-10 hours a day which are killing people (literally, through stress) in the long run.
This is totally me (without the Microsoft junk :P). Ouch… :( I've thought of drugs for helping me focus too because this lack of focus has grown into all sorts of areas of my life… :(
"Focus" is an alluring yet elusive thing for me… :\