great timely post! thank you !
I never finish anyth
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: I never finish anyth
#92Just some encouragement here for you good people... You have to do the work. There is no one else that can do it for you. It is entirely up to you; actually, it has only ever been you, because it is you that rolls out of bed early to bring it. No one is going to do that for you. If you want to do it, then you will figure out a way to make it happen. Like some of you, I have a family. That makes things a bit challengi…
Wow, great comment. That's the first time I've wanted to buy someone Reddit Gold on Hacker News!
Re: I never finish anyth
#93It was the same for me for several ideas/projects that i started with. Then i realised what was the reason makes me not touching the project after a while... The first steps are always known and can be done by almost everyone. - Buy the domain - Construct the idea - Even, start coding the project And here comes the reasons why you slowly starting not to touch the project anymore; - You realise that you are not sure h…
> - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production.
My advice for this is don't worry about it. Just hand install on a cheap shared web hosting place and manually copy stuff across to get it up and running.
When that gets too annoying, start automating. When your home grown automation scripts get long and unwieldy, look into Capistrano or Puppet (or Chef, or Ansible). The important thing is: make it work first, then make it beautiful.
> - You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those.
I feel you there! :-) Having an idea and trying to think of how to get someone to pay for it is daunting to me. I feel like a blank canvas and I have no idea where to start.
> - Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company.
Again, don't worry about it. If you make so much money that it matters—well, that is a good problem to have. You can always incorporate (or whatever) later. And if you're pulling in a lot of money you can afford a lawyer to just handle it all for you.
- You don't know how to licence your idea/project
If you're making a web site or a app store app (binary distribution) then again, it doesn't really matter. If it becomes so wildly popular that people start abusing it somehow, and in quantities that matter—again, that's a nice problem to have (compared to no one using your site or app).
If you're releasing source, then pick MIT, BSD, or GPL (just choose randomly if you have no opinion). If the one you picked turns out to have side effects that you didn't foresee, then feel free to change it–it's your code after all, so you can do what you want (though if you get a whole bunch of external contributors, it gets hairier).
One thing I've found that really really helps—get a partner. Having another person around (and not necessarily physically) is a great way to help keep you from getting distracted. This is why companies get stuff done—there's always someone around working and you can't just slack off without losing face to everyone around you. It's really hard to sit around and read reddit all day when the 3 people in the room with you are all working hard…
Re: I never finish anyth
#94Reminded me of this story: http://www.leanexpertise.com/TPMONLINE/articles_on_total_pro... One day a management consultant, Ivy Lee, called on Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Lee outlined briefly his firm's services, ending with the statement: "With our service, you'll know how to manage better." The indignant Schwab said, "I'm not managing as well now as I know how. What we need around here is not more "knowi…
I was curious about Ivy Lee [1]; some interesting tidbits:
> he was retained by John D. Rockefeller Jr to represent his family and Standard Oil, ("to burnish the family image"), after the coal mining rebellion in Colorado known as the "Ludlow Massacre". Upton Sinclair dubbed him "Poison Ivy" after Lee tried to send bulletins saying those that died were victims of an overturned stove, when in fact they were shot by the Colorado militia.
> Lee espoused a philosophy consistent with what has sometimes been called the "two-way street" approach to public relations, in which PR consists of helping clients listen as well as communicate messages to their publics. In practice, however, Lee often engaged in one-way propagandizing on behalf of clients despised by the public.
> Shortly before his death in 1934, the US Congress had been investigating his work in Nazi Germany on behalf of the controversial company IG Farben.
Re: I never finish anyth
#95I finally managed to finish one! http://www.youshouldbuythese.com I think the secret to a successful side-project is deciding on an MVP that can be built in a single weekend. I've found that I'm also much more likely to keep iterating on a project if it's already in a 'finished' state. I seem to run out of steam or lost interest in my more ambitious side-projects, where working for a whole weekend will only get you 1…
I signed in and I got
an editor I own a book I own another book I own the newer version of a phone I used to own (had s3, got s4)
a mouse I am going to consider buying a keyboard that probably would have been my choice if I didn't get a kinesis
nicely done.
Re: I never finish anyth
#96Reminded me of this story: http://www.leanexpertise.com/TPMONLINE/articles_on_total_pro... One day a management consultant, Ivy Lee, called on Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Lee outlined briefly his firm's services, ending with the statement: "With our service, you'll know how to manage better." The indignant Schwab said, "I'm not managing as well now as I know how. What we need around here is not more "knowi…
Great story. I'm off to find me some index cards!
Re: I never finish anyth
#97It was the same for me for several ideas/projects that i started with. Then i realised what was the reason makes me not touching the project after a while... The first steps are always known and can be done by almost everyone. - Buy the domain - Construct the idea - Even, start coding the project And here comes the reasons why you slowly starting not to touch the project anymore; - You realise that you are not sure h…
> - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. My advice for this is don't worry about it. Just hand install on a cheap shared web hosting place and manually copy stuff across to get it up and running. When that gets too annoying, start automating. When your home grown automation scripts get long and unwieldy, look into Capistrano or Puppet (or Chef, or Ansible). The important thing is: make…
Except the first one, thanks a lot for looking at the bright side of things and the advises! but..
How can i not worry about deployment?
What happens after people trusting and starts using my 'lets say' web app and after 2 weeks i get my database hacked? Companies have TechOps department just for deploying the applications correctly. I am not trying to argue but trying to explain how i think of this :)
Maybe i am being little bit too much paranoid... Should i just set Apache/Passenger with some basic configuration and wish that everything is safe enough ?
Re: I never finish anyth
#98I know exactly where you're coming from. In my studies I've found this behavior common amongst people that are INTJs (including myself). I would comically refer to myself as a serial project starter. I finally realized the pattern of getting all excited, pushing out a lot of code, and then abandoning the project a month in long before it's done. Launching my site yesterday was a relief to finish a project and push it out for the world to see. Even if nobody uses it I'm glad that I finished something.
Re: I never finish anyth
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I think realizing you need to engage your will and discipline yourself into working hard when you don't want to is the easy part. The really really hard part is actually doing it. How do you find will where there is none? How do you motivate yourself when you feel unmotivated about everything? When you feel stuck in the rat race, stuck in the routine of monotony? How can I restore the drive and motivation…
I once read something that Tim Ferriss had said in response to a similar question. I'm heavily paraphrasing, but he was basically asked how he had so much more discipline than most others. He responded by saying that he doesn't have more discipline - he just creates environments that decrease his opportunities to fail (ie. get distracted) and increase his likelihood to succeed (ie. finish the work). The idea is to no…
That actually is a very simple approach but makes a lot of sense, I'll definitely think about it, thanks for writing it down.
Re: I never finish anyth
#100Just some encouragement here for you good people... You have to do the work. There is no one else that can do it for you. It is entirely up to you; actually, it has only ever been you, because it is you that rolls out of bed early to bring it. No one is going to do that for you. If you want to do it, then you will figure out a way to make it happen. Like some of you, I have a family. That makes things a bit challengi…
> Also, let go of "Internet Time." That is to say, we all read HN and see these impressive "Show HN" posts, and submitted stories about the Next Big Thing... and it seems like things are happening so fast, and we think, "Why even try?" Well, the reality is nothing is happening fast. It is an illusion. Most all of these stories have an incredible amount of time and work behind them, so let go of that illusion, get sta…
I'm sure some of those Show HN posts are knocked out over a weekend, and I might have done that when I was 20 and had oceans of time, but not now that I'm 34 and have too many other things going on besides programming.
My own submission from a year ago [0] which is quite meager compared to most of those Show HN posts was developed in the free time I could scrounge out over a period of 3 months. I spent another month or so after that polishing a first version. Then I took a break from hobby programming for half a year to play some games that were sitting in my steam account, and now over the course of the past few months I've been developing a javascript library to sync JSON data in a P2P way, which will take another few months until it's ready to post to HN (if I ever finish it ;) ). It's not easy to find time for programming hobby projects when you have a family, a job, a life and a collection of books/games/movies to get through :)
Anyway, the way that I see it you have to do these projects for yourself, not for anyone else. You write them to scratch an itch, to see an idea blossom or wither, to enjoy the act of coding. Posting them online is the thing you do after you've done the thing you wanted to do.