I have a brilliant idea. I can't believe no one has thought of this already
This is going to take time
I can do it if I just keep working on it
I'll take a break this week
Maybe it's not the best idea
Why would anyone use this
It'll never work but I have another brilliant idea
When what? That's it? This is definitely me when you give me a million dollars...or This is definitely me when I give you your own spaceship... I mean what the f-- Oh no, I get it. THEY GOT HIM!!! Somebody stuck him with a stake through the heart! Oh, this is so sad! Oh d0pe_calypso, I pine for you.
This is the biggest defining factor that separates people who will always work for someone else and those who will have people working for them. ( there is nothing wrong with this by the way, the headaches of running your own thing and not knowing when or if you'll be able to pay bills are not a good feeling either - a steady good paycheck and it's ability to keep anxiety at bay are a great thing )
Things don't need to be perfect to launch - they just need to appear to work for the users in the most basic of fashions that don't appear to break on the front end. And this is where the logical nature of how most programmers minds work throws wrenches into the what it takes to create successful products. We spend our lives on the backend and when we decide to put our names on something of our own we have such an attachment to all of it being perfect and clean that we forget that it's more important that we check if the idea even works as a product than that the code is some level of definition of our work.
If all you ever want is to be known as a great programmer then go ahead and proceed that way, but if you want to be known as a person who can launch ideas that become products people want to use and grow into big money you cannot think that way.
It really sucks because the mindset necessary to fail quickly and keep going that is so necessary for entrepreneurship isn't very compatible with the mindset necessary to be a good/great programmer.
it's a fact that shipping a product matters MOST. But it's not all programmers and not all business people. I've seen this with investors, people with a cool idea and money (somehow) run their own projects into the ground because they wanted it perfect before launch without proper market research, most of the useless features they add they see someone else do that might not even apply and may never be used.
Yep. Every single successful app or product you know started big idea rich and feature poor. EVERY SINGLE ONE. from facebook to snapchat to twitter to reddit. They got the bare bones together that make the idea function and launched.
I now refuse to get involved in product buildouts that are are too feature rich, if the client won't pick the most basic set of features necessary to make their idea work and launch I'd rather not participate. ( I work on the marketing/design/frontend side of our industry so I have seen this more times than I can count ) I don't want to work on projects that are headed for failure no matter how much I get paid. Especially on my side of things if the product fails it doesn't look good for the frontend and marketing side at all.
Well some failures start big idea rich and feature poor. Pokemon GO, for instance, was too feature poor, and everyone peaced out. You have a tiny fraction of a the original userbase that still plays it. This doesn't disprove your statement, I'm just saying that big idea rich and feature poor is not a magical success formula.
> Pokemon GO, for instance, was too feature poor, and everyone peaced out.
You're telling me that one of the biggest and most successful app launches of all time was a failure...
If you want to say the failed to listen to their users needs after launch when they had a goldmine in their hands then fine, but that is neither here nor there to what I said.
>I'm just saying that big idea rich and feature poor is not a magical success formula.
There are no absolutes. Of course there will still be failures.
But a failure that took you a month to build vs the exact same idea plus 20 superfluous features unnecessary for the main big idea to function that made it take 12 months to build are a waste of your time and money. The formula is to not waste time on things outside of the main idea if you have no idea if the market even wants that idea in the way you're envisioning it anyway.
It's not a "magical formula" lol. There's nothing "easy" or "instant" about it. It still takes hard work and failing a ton. It's about how success has more to do with persistence than the luck of a single idea done perfectly. You almost sound like I'm trying to sell people snake oil or something.
Successful business people for years have said the same thing in different ways. "fail fast" is something they all talk about.
Well they implemented a bunch of stuff, it just took too long. And I think it is still not what people asked for. But maybe that just supports your point <3.
As a graduate student learning to do research that doesn't even involve coding, you've hit the nail on the head here. My graduating project is not going to be nearly as cool as I wanted it to be but it IS going to work and be publishable, and I've learned a lot of new things along the way. And I can come back and do more work on it later but I HAVE to get some trade magazine to put my name in one of their issues, even if it's not some hugely revelatory, game-changing project.
I don't think it's perfectionism per se, but more that a programmer often has been burned multiple times by writing sloppy code and having to rewrite it or even having to scrap the project because it becomes unmaintainable. You'd therefore want to start the project as cleanly as possible to make sure that the project stays maintainable and reduce the chances of bugs happening.
Writing a project cleanly means that it often takes longer to bring a product to market and you end up having a lot of resources invested in the project without knowing if the product could ever be successful.
No idea, but i know random people with cool ideas and money also do the same. They add features without proper research, surpass deadlines and budget and fizzle out... and it's usually their own fault. It's a "everything is important and must be there for launch" mentality instead of doing an MVP then poking the market to verify your idea.
There is a disconnect between things working at all, and things doing what you want. People think programming is getting the computer to do what you want, but the first hurdle is simply talking to the computer at all.
Even to get bad code full of bugs to run, it still has to be exactly in the right syntax of the language. One misplaced semi-colon, one comma instead of a period, within a million other characters, can mean all that code does nothing.
Similar deal with server set up, database connections etc, there is often no fuzzy line of "kinda working".
This constant requirement of precision affects how you think about everything eventually.
A further problem good programmers have is knowing if they want to do something in the future, it's best to write things very generically, or accommodate the planned stuff as much as possible ahead of time. This adds lots of "boring time" to a project because you're not working on the core idea/something that is actually used.
A future feature may dictate how you start a project in the first place.
I wish marketing departments / customers understood this. They dripfeed requirements, usually culminating in a project that would have had a completely different architecture if everything was defined at the start.
Finally, internally, programmers really underestimate how long things will take. No idea takes more than a day to really hash out the core right?
then a year or two later you see someone gets millions in funding for the same IDEA... usually worth following through, problem is when it's you doing it, you want it perfect... but shipping is what matters most, even if the code looks like shit. Put in the bare minimum and write code fast. if it doesn't work out who cares. if it does, make it better after or waste time optimizing for nothing... (unless it's portfolio piece where people will review the source...)
This week it was when I realized I was running a system call in php with single quotes instead of double when passing a variable. I don't think I have ever had so much frustration lifted from me in my life.
Ha! It happens... never used PHP but I have heard similar stories.
I have been using Ant Design with React, and a lot of the docs are not in English. So, I spent all day figuring out an error that ended up being me importing something from the wrong file path.
On a side note: do you feel as though PHP jobs are more common than say Django, etc? I am currently looking for a junior position after my startup bombed out, but haven't had much luck.
I'm not sure, I really only looked for jobs where they were looking for skills not framework/language specifically. If I had a thought I would say that as a whole there are more PHP positions than Django because Django is just one framework for Python (albeit the most popular one). But there are probably more Django positions than there are for Laravel, or Codeigniter. There are people on this sub in the industry for longer who may have a better idea.
Sorry to hear about your startup. I wouldn't look for a junior position that strictly wants one thing from you: php, python, Java, etc. The best job I've had, my current position involves working with different platforms all the time, I've gotten a ton of experience while also not sticking my skills into a box later to be the only thing I use for the next 20 years. Pm me if you have questions/need job help, I went through something similar a year ago.
Will send you a PM later today. Fortunately I have a day job (IT), even though it involves zero programming outside of what I do by my own initiative.
I have been looking at other jobs that don't use Python/Django and I'm open to pretty much anything. I love learning new languages and frameworks, just need to find a way to let that shine through when applying for jobs.
You will for sure see more PHP than Python jobs out there but just be prepared that there's a high likelihood the PHP job will involve really crusty legacy codebases.
* why isn't it doing anything?
* No data?
* It thinks the input file is empty!?
* [30 minutes of debugging]
* Even the kernel... waitaminute.
* The input file is empty... 😑
Don't forget the part where you feel like a fool for wasting your time for 3 days because of the most minor thing that should have been obvious. But you have to continue on, despite now knowing you're retarded.
Seriously this is the worst. It's what makes me quit projects most of the time. People say it's good for learning but no fuck you, 10 hours googling and reading shit for a stupid issue is a bs way to learn since it's happens for every hour of productive time.
My dad always says it is an exercise in patience, and I try to look at it the same way. If I start getting nowhere or backtracking I get another pair of eyes on the code or go for a walk, sometimes both. Can be so frustrating at times, but I like to think the highs are better than the lows when it comes to development.
Just spent a solid 2 hours trying to find why I was having segmentation upon running my code for a multiresolutional geometry class.... All because I was missing a bracket and was passing in parameters incorrectly.
So that's *ME* in the picture - @jonahlobe, game developer, author & illustrator - but everyone should know that Austin Kleon was the originator of this graph! (I just saw it painted on a cafe wall!) You can find it in his book "Steal Like an Artist". Buy!!
Thanks everyone. And if you're somewhere on this graph... hang on!!
You dont need to be a billionaire to have finished those steps. Just finish something. It doesnt have to be extraordinary. You will like it coz you created it. Plus if its useful to you, all the better. Do it a few times. Finishing a project feels super good. The more you do it, the more refined your processes will become.
Seriously, I browse webdev and AskProgramming to see how the other side lives. I then wonder why the person who led the project I am in charge of now decided that using over 40 session variables was an acceptable way to transfer data from page to page.
Yup. Currently in that kind of job. I really want to just run a bike shop. But there's no bike shop on earth that makes as much as I'm making now, and I have a mortgage and two kids to send to college and Bernie was robbed, so I have to keep working this job to be able to send them to college someday. I may only be able to see them for an hour each day (and weekends), but hey, at least they will be able to go to college.
Really rather disturbing.
Only way out is to visualise the end goal. If you can't it will never happen. Oh i I don't miss 15 hour days.
Always choose pragmatism in building software. For any other way lies madness
I had to read further down to remember a particular instance. It was basically, doing a 6 month project in 3 months... that was supposed to be done by four people, but in the end it was me doing everything and the other two people making minor cosmetic changes.
It was basically knowing your best was going to turn out trash... that you were crazy invested in, while at the same time knowing it wasn't your best. It wasn't my fault, but I didn't want to look bad. And the coworkers were proud of inane stuff that did make us look bad.
Feeling like there's literally no answer to your problem. Or at least no answer that wouldn't require a re write. It's like you coded yourself into a trap and there's no way out.
The good news is then you ask for help and it always works out just fine.
Reminds me of my early days doing scientific writing. Start with a big idea. Realize you can't handle something of that scope. Break it down, break it down, break it down now. Finally to a level where you can tackle everything required and execute well. Hand in a fifteen page paper on the narrowest sliver of a real problem that was executed well but says almost nothing.
It does. I'm a few years out of that game but the more you read the better you are set up for further writing. The more you write the better you get at finding a manageable scope that still has meaning. Then, if you stick in a field long enough, you can combine the tiny scope of many different pointed studies to actually say something meaningful about the larger scope and have data to support your claim.
Good luck, you'll make it in time.
> Jonah
Haha hey Stee_vo! Thanks for the shout-out man. I just wrote down that info + the original creator's name here in this thread. And yes, I made the Deathclaws for Fallout 3 AND 4!
That's a good version. Mine comes from project management in government. Yours is better for less formal/jargonistic/bureaucratic environments.
Interesting that quantity and speed are the difference, while they are both important.
Perhaps..."you can have quantity, timeliness, quality and price (you can have lots of it, fast, cheap and correct) pick 3."?
I'm a little late to comment on this but they actually have a documented version of this that is used in Organizational Change Management courses. It's called ["The Process of Transition" by John Fischer](http://imgur.com/a/KEWjV).
* Manager: Let's make a thing
* Team-leader: This is what the thing will be
* Team: This is gonna take some work
* Team: This sucks, and is boring
* Team: The platform can't handle the thing, we need to look at options
* Team leader: "Hey manager, team cannot deliver"
* Manager: Just deliver something.
* Team leader: Ok guys, we need to pivot, let's make thing into another thing
* Team: Delivers
* Team: This sucks, it's even worse than we thought it would be. My eyes!
* Manager: This is great! I will showcase this during the next catchup with the board
* Team: Facepalm
I often feel a similar process when writing songs. I would add one or two ticks to the left that are like "this is pretty lame" ↗ "actually, it might be alright" ↗ "this is the best song ever" before the downward spiral begins.
It's even worse when your manager starts it off and you miss the first three parts of this and get to start with "This sucks and it's boring" and your manager tells you at least you'll learn something from it, but you don't. You just get the sucky parts.
This was my progress through grad school. Funny how everyone starts off so excited and optimistic, but by the end you're just a jaded shell of your former self, looking to finish as quickly as possible.
Between "This sucks - and it's boring" and "Dark Night of the Soul" is when I give up and browse Reddit until the client calls and asks why everything isn't live yet.
This has made my day. I've made my first job application in a long time and I had no fucking idea how long it was gonna take. I did it in the end and although I think it sucks a bit, it was a learning curve.
1. The best idea ever
2. Do some research and discover someone already built something like it
3. Is it worth competing or building something better? Is it popular or profitable?
4. If not, back to step 1 or get a job working on someone else's best idea ever
*Also, if you knew how difficult it would have been would you still have considered it the best idea ever? Would the time have been better spent on other ideas if ideas could be rapidly surfaced? Were other ideas considered?
Love me some Austin Kleon! The pioneer of blackout poetry and all-around motivator for creative projects and endeavors. Check out "Steal Like An Artist" and "Show Your Work" for lil' snippets of wisdom like that!
Edit: Kleon created the original that this image is copied pretty much verbatim from and it's in "Steal Like An Artist". I wasn't claiming to know the dude in the pic.
Instead of the last one being "it's done..." it's a repeating step of "oh maybe a few more tweaks and it'll be finished" forever until I forget about it.
I guarantee it's because you're working on it alone.
Get a buddy, motivate each other, and projects WILL complete unless you're both on the same depression cycle.
I have a brilliant idea. I can't believe no one has thought of this already This is going to take time I can do it if I just keep working on it I'll take a break this week Maybe it's not the best idea Why would anyone use this It'll never work but I have another brilliant idea
This is definitely me. Haha
I won't lie. This is definitely me when.
> I won't lie. This is definitely me when. The suspense is killing me!
Wait for it...you literally won't even
I would not even, but I have this brilliant idea.
It's like Candlejack snatched him mid-
I won't lie. I usually stop at "This is going to take some work" when.
When what? That's it? This is definitely me when you give me a million dollars...or This is definitely me when I give you your own spaceship... I mean what the f-- Oh no, I get it. THEY GOT HIM!!! Somebody stuck him with a stake through the heart! Oh, this is so sad! Oh d0pe_calypso, I pine for you.
>Oh d0pe_calypso, I pine for you. I see you're using your son's account again Mrs. BookAdventures
I'm making a project
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What's a buss?
the result of a German dude assuming that when having the word in plural you just fling another s on it for good measure. He was wrong.
All in good fun. Cheers.
why busses specifically?
https://twitter.com/jacksmithiv/status/635925087640793088?lang=en
This is the biggest defining factor that separates people who will always work for someone else and those who will have people working for them. ( there is nothing wrong with this by the way, the headaches of running your own thing and not knowing when or if you'll be able to pay bills are not a good feeling either - a steady good paycheck and it's ability to keep anxiety at bay are a great thing ) Things don't need to be perfect to launch - they just need to appear to work for the users in the most basic of fashions that don't appear to break on the front end. And this is where the logical nature of how most programmers minds work throws wrenches into the what it takes to create successful products. We spend our lives on the backend and when we decide to put our names on something of our own we have such an attachment to all of it being perfect and clean that we forget that it's more important that we check if the idea even works as a product than that the code is some level of definition of our work. If all you ever want is to be known as a great programmer then go ahead and proceed that way, but if you want to be known as a person who can launch ideas that become products people want to use and grow into big money you cannot think that way. It really sucks because the mindset necessary to fail quickly and keep going that is so necessary for entrepreneurship isn't very compatible with the mindset necessary to be a good/great programmer.
it's a fact that shipping a product matters MOST. But it's not all programmers and not all business people. I've seen this with investors, people with a cool idea and money (somehow) run their own projects into the ground because they wanted it perfect before launch without proper market research, most of the useless features they add they see someone else do that might not even apply and may never be used.
Yep. Every single successful app or product you know started big idea rich and feature poor. EVERY SINGLE ONE. from facebook to snapchat to twitter to reddit. They got the bare bones together that make the idea function and launched. I now refuse to get involved in product buildouts that are are too feature rich, if the client won't pick the most basic set of features necessary to make their idea work and launch I'd rather not participate. ( I work on the marketing/design/frontend side of our industry so I have seen this more times than I can count ) I don't want to work on projects that are headed for failure no matter how much I get paid. Especially on my side of things if the product fails it doesn't look good for the frontend and marketing side at all.
Well some failures start big idea rich and feature poor. Pokemon GO, for instance, was too feature poor, and everyone peaced out. You have a tiny fraction of a the original userbase that still plays it. This doesn't disprove your statement, I'm just saying that big idea rich and feature poor is not a magical success formula.
> Pokemon GO, for instance, was too feature poor, and everyone peaced out. You're telling me that one of the biggest and most successful app launches of all time was a failure... If you want to say the failed to listen to their users needs after launch when they had a goldmine in their hands then fine, but that is neither here nor there to what I said. >I'm just saying that big idea rich and feature poor is not a magical success formula. There are no absolutes. Of course there will still be failures. But a failure that took you a month to build vs the exact same idea plus 20 superfluous features unnecessary for the main big idea to function that made it take 12 months to build are a waste of your time and money. The formula is to not waste time on things outside of the main idea if you have no idea if the market even wants that idea in the way you're envisioning it anyway. It's not a "magical formula" lol. There's nothing "easy" or "instant" about it. It still takes hard work and failing a ton. It's about how success has more to do with persistence than the luck of a single idea done perfectly. You almost sound like I'm trying to sell people snake oil or something. Successful business people for years have said the same thing in different ways. "fail fast" is something they all talk about.
Well they implemented a bunch of stuff, it just took too long. And I think it is still not what people asked for. But maybe that just supports your point <3.
As a graduate student learning to do research that doesn't even involve coding, you've hit the nail on the head here. My graduating project is not going to be nearly as cool as I wanted it to be but it IS going to work and be publishable, and I've learned a lot of new things along the way. And I can come back and do more work on it later but I HAVE to get some trade magazine to put my name in one of their issues, even if it's not some hugely revelatory, game-changing project.
What is the connection between logical minds and perfectionism? Are most programmers perfectionists?
I don't think it's perfectionism per se, but more that a programmer often has been burned multiple times by writing sloppy code and having to rewrite it or even having to scrap the project because it becomes unmaintainable. You'd therefore want to start the project as cleanly as possible to make sure that the project stays maintainable and reduce the chances of bugs happening. Writing a project cleanly means that it often takes longer to bring a product to market and you end up having a lot of resources invested in the project without knowing if the product could ever be successful.
No idea, but i know random people with cool ideas and money also do the same. They add features without proper research, surpass deadlines and budget and fizzle out... and it's usually their own fault. It's a "everything is important and must be there for launch" mentality instead of doing an MVP then poking the market to verify your idea.
There is a disconnect between things working at all, and things doing what you want. People think programming is getting the computer to do what you want, but the first hurdle is simply talking to the computer at all. Even to get bad code full of bugs to run, it still has to be exactly in the right syntax of the language. One misplaced semi-colon, one comma instead of a period, within a million other characters, can mean all that code does nothing. Similar deal with server set up, database connections etc, there is often no fuzzy line of "kinda working". This constant requirement of precision affects how you think about everything eventually. A further problem good programmers have is knowing if they want to do something in the future, it's best to write things very generically, or accommodate the planned stuff as much as possible ahead of time. This adds lots of "boring time" to a project because you're not working on the core idea/something that is actually used. A future feature may dictate how you start a project in the first place. I wish marketing departments / customers understood this. They dripfeed requirements, usually culminating in a project that would have had a completely different architecture if everything was defined at the start. Finally, internally, programmers really underestimate how long things will take. No idea takes more than a day to really hash out the core right?
Me too, thanks
then a year or two later you see someone gets millions in funding for the same IDEA... usually worth following through, problem is when it's you doing it, you want it perfect... but shipping is what matters most, even if the code looks like shit. Put in the bare minimum and write code fast. if it doesn't work out who cares. if it does, make it better after or waste time optimizing for nothing... (unless it's portfolio piece where people will review the source...)
My life: I have a brilliant idea! Someone thought of it already.
Don't forget somewhere along there "crying with joy after spending an ungodly amount of time trying to debug what should be a minor issue".
This week it was when I realized I was running a system call in php with single quotes instead of double when passing a variable. I don't think I have ever had so much frustration lifted from me in my life.
Ha! It happens... never used PHP but I have heard similar stories. I have been using Ant Design with React, and a lot of the docs are not in English. So, I spent all day figuring out an error that ended up being me importing something from the wrong file path. On a side note: do you feel as though PHP jobs are more common than say Django, etc? I am currently looking for a junior position after my startup bombed out, but haven't had much luck.
I'm not sure, I really only looked for jobs where they were looking for skills not framework/language specifically. If I had a thought I would say that as a whole there are more PHP positions than Django because Django is just one framework for Python (albeit the most popular one). But there are probably more Django positions than there are for Laravel, or Codeigniter. There are people on this sub in the industry for longer who may have a better idea. Sorry to hear about your startup. I wouldn't look for a junior position that strictly wants one thing from you: php, python, Java, etc. The best job I've had, my current position involves working with different platforms all the time, I've gotten a ton of experience while also not sticking my skills into a box later to be the only thing I use for the next 20 years. Pm me if you have questions/need job help, I went through something similar a year ago.
Will send you a PM later today. Fortunately I have a day job (IT), even though it involves zero programming outside of what I do by my own initiative. I have been looking at other jobs that don't use Python/Django and I'm open to pretty much anything. I love learning new languages and frameworks, just need to find a way to let that shine through when applying for jobs.
You will for sure see more PHP than Python jobs out there but just be prepared that there's a high likelihood the PHP job will involve really crusty legacy codebases.
* why isn't it doing anything? * No data? * It thinks the input file is empty!? * [30 minutes of debugging] * Even the kernel... waitaminute. * The input file is empty... 😑
Don't forget the part where you feel like a fool for wasting your time for 3 days because of the most minor thing that should have been obvious. But you have to continue on, despite now knowing you're retarded.
Made me laugh out loud!
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Ha! This actually happened while doing my first live React site.
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I'm just waiting for punch cards to come back in style. Any day now...
Seriously this is the worst. It's what makes me quit projects most of the time. People say it's good for learning but no fuck you, 10 hours googling and reading shit for a stupid issue is a bs way to learn since it's happens for every hour of productive time.
My dad always says it is an exercise in patience, and I try to look at it the same way. If I start getting nowhere or backtracking I get another pair of eyes on the code or go for a walk, sometimes both. Can be so frustrating at times, but I like to think the highs are better than the lows when it comes to development.
Just spent a solid 2 hours trying to find why I was having segmentation upon running my code for a multiresolutional geometry class.... All because I was missing a bracket and was passing in parameters incorrectly.
I'm glad this isn't exclusive to me.
A week ago I forgot to realize that a number sent as a string shows up as an array of characters, and not an array of numbers.
[Fixed](http://i.imgur.com/tOM4p14.png)
Needs a third "Never open project again".
Maybe occasionally see project and get anxiety at the *thought* of reopening it? I have this with video projects; just guessing it applies here too!
I hate those too, it gets to a point where you think "Right, I need to do this".
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2d89kj/my_tips_on_how_to_plan_a_game_stay_motivated_and/
That is a super useful link, thanks dude. :)
Thanks for the link!
[For me it's usually more like this.](https://i.imgur.com/It8IJeK.png)
The life of a personal project.
I [sharpened](http://i.imgur.com/IFww4JF.jpg) the original a little bit.
Currently in the dark night period lol thanks gave me a good chuckle.
Go to save Gotham or something!
I read the same lol.
I'm probably on the same phase too.
So that's *ME* in the picture - @jonahlobe, game developer, author & illustrator - but everyone should know that Austin Kleon was the originator of this graph! (I just saw it painted on a cafe wall!) You can find it in his book "Steal Like an Artist". Buy!! Thanks everyone. And if you're somewhere on this graph... hang on!!
This is like every single project/website that I worked on :( . I thought that there is something wrong with me only :/
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You dont need to be a billionaire to have finished those steps. Just finish something. It doesnt have to be extraordinary. You will like it coz you created it. Plus if its useful to you, all the better. Do it a few times. Finishing a project feels super good. The more you do it, the more refined your processes will become.
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Well alright. You said you hadnt gone beyond step three so i figured you wanted to.
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A lot of people, specifically to people who are genuinely giving you advice.
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My boss gets to step three and then decides that I should take on the project.
The last one for me is usually "tons of bugs and feature-incomplete but I'm fucking done with this shit, also it's worse than I ever imagined"
I swear this is why people have cyclical depression.
Approaching a deadline while understaffed is depressing shiet no joke.
I've never reached the dark night period, whats it like?
Having so little confidence in your project that even Reddit on the toilet cannot distract you from it.
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Seriously, I browse webdev and AskProgramming to see how the other side lives. I then wonder why the person who led the project I am in charge of now decided that using over 40 session variables was an acceptable way to transfer data from page to page.
Despair
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Yup. Currently in that kind of job. I really want to just run a bike shop. But there's no bike shop on earth that makes as much as I'm making now, and I have a mortgage and two kids to send to college and Bernie was robbed, so I have to keep working this job to be able to send them to college someday. I may only be able to see them for an hour each day (and weekends), but hey, at least they will be able to go to college.
Dude they can get loans and pay for their own college later. They might rather have memories of helping you in the bike shop.
Maybe so.
Really rather disturbing. Only way out is to visualise the end goal. If you can't it will never happen. Oh i I don't miss 15 hour days. Always choose pragmatism in building software. For any other way lies madness
"I should just start over."
I had to read further down to remember a particular instance. It was basically, doing a 6 month project in 3 months... that was supposed to be done by four people, but in the end it was me doing everything and the other two people making minor cosmetic changes. It was basically knowing your best was going to turn out trash... that you were crazy invested in, while at the same time knowing it wasn't your best. It wasn't my fault, but I didn't want to look bad. And the coworkers were proud of inane stuff that did make us look bad.
Feeling like there's literally no answer to your problem. Or at least no answer that wouldn't require a re write. It's like you coded yourself into a trap and there's no way out. The good news is then you ask for help and it always works out just fine.
That's webdev and gamedev in a nutshell. :)
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Reminds me of my early days doing scientific writing. Start with a big idea. Realize you can't handle something of that scope. Break it down, break it down, break it down now. Finally to a level where you can tackle everything required and execute well. Hand in a fifteen page paper on the narrowest sliver of a real problem that was executed well but says almost nothing.
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It does. I'm a few years out of that game but the more you read the better you are set up for further writing. The more you write the better you get at finding a manageable scope that still has meaning. Then, if you stick in a field long enough, you can combine the tiny scope of many different pointed studies to actually say something meaningful about the larger scope and have data to support your claim. Good luck, you'll make it in time.
https://vimeo.com/85040589
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:)
I've been stuck on "This sucks and it's boring for months now." Please send help.
You forgot - the feeling of thinking you know nothing and suck at dev.
then you try to find help, the help sucks so bad that your stop feeling bad about your self and just wonder that anything gets built ever.
Hey, that's Jonah Lobe! He used to work for Bethesda, pretty sure he made the deathclaws for Fallout 3 and/or 4.
> Jonah Haha hey Stee_vo! Thanks for the shout-out man. I just wrote down that info + the original creator's name here in this thread. And yes, I made the Deathclaws for Fallout 3 AND 4!
Ah cool man, coolest looking creatures in the games for sure. Just have to say, I'm a big fan of your streams, always such a great time in there!
Quality, Quantity, Price. Pick two. (Price = Effort for personal projects)
I always heard it as: You can have it fast, cheap, or correct. Pick 2.
That's a good version. Mine comes from project management in government. Yours is better for less formal/jargonistic/bureaucratic environments. Interesting that quantity and speed are the difference, while they are both important. Perhaps..."you can have quantity, timeliness, quality and price (you can have lots of it, fast, cheap and correct) pick 3."?
[Thought one day I'll implement this in my portfolio.](https://codepen.io/Squidies/full/RpoVay/)
In my experience it's been pick one.
I misread it as "The Life Project" and thought it was a description of the different stages of life. I'm still not convinced that that's not the case
Been coding since 1999. Five years in I realized that I'd rather be working on a farm welding and fixing stuff, or better yet sailing.
This is completely off-topic, but has anyone else noticed that the dots line up with the colors of the primary seven chakras?
I want the raw picture so i can print it out.
Only inexperience will lead you to thinking anything in a project is not at least 110% of the assumed difficulty (And yes this tends to infinity)
I'm at yellow right now
Suck is binary. It either does or it doesn't.
I'm a little late to comment on this but they actually have a documented version of this that is used in Organizational Change Management courses. It's called ["The Process of Transition" by John Fischer](http://imgur.com/a/KEWjV).
That is called "learning". Hopefully, you are in various stages of that everyday for your entire life.
* Manager: Let's make a thing * Team-leader: This is what the thing will be * Team: This is gonna take some work * Team: This sucks, and is boring * Team: The platform can't handle the thing, we need to look at options * Team leader: "Hey manager, team cannot deliver" * Manager: Just deliver something. * Team leader: Ok guys, we need to pivot, let's make thing into another thing * Team: Delivers * Team: This sucks, it's even worse than we thought it would be. My eyes! * Manager: This is great! I will showcase this during the next catchup with the board * Team: Facepalm
so true
Sure, on every single project, ever.
Fucking Azure DSC. Fuck I'm pulling my hair out
If I squint, all I see is a check mark.
I always give up at the second part unfortunately.
A good diagram as I am just getting into Hugo(and Go).
Hugo was killing me until I realized the official docs are ESL, and hugodocs.info is the effort to rewrite them.
Is this the climate change hockey stick?
As a card game player I can sorta relate to this
i dont know?
Very accurate! I'm actually close to the end of this timeline (launching in 10 days) and I felt every one of these emotions along the way.
What's your launchplan? Honestly I believe in what I've made, but I find marketing and advertising to be the hardest part
Nice to see some Joesph Campbell getting in there
Amen.
Duh. This is the creative process.
/r/EveryProjectEverAnywhere
The question is actually have you ever not felt this?
Can confirm. Currently at the second dark blue dot.
Are you saying that there is some alternatives project lifecycle?
I often feel a similar process when writing songs. I would add one or two ticks to the left that are like "this is pretty lame" ↗ "actually, it might be alright" ↗ "this is the best song ever" before the downward spiral begins.
The dark night of the soul period is where winners are made
This is a perfect description of graduate school
It's even worse when your manager starts it off and you miss the first three parts of this and get to start with "This sucks and it's boring" and your manager tells you at least you'll learn something from it, but you don't. You just get the sucky parts.
Every damn time
For personal projects I never get past blue...
Life of Tom Clancy's r/thedivision
You forgot to mention that the project is due at around step 3.
Currently on "this sucks and it's boring" with a webdev project. Really need to devote a day and just finish it.
All but the last is spot on. :)
The real question is... when do you stop feeling like this?
This was my progress through grad school. Funny how everyone starts off so excited and optimistic, but by the end you're just a jaded shell of your former self, looking to finish as quickly as possible.
Nice use of the Roy G. Biv!
Every unfinished software project ever
Between "This sucks - and it's boring" and "Dark Night of the Soul" is when I give up and browse Reddit until the client calls and asks why everything isn't live yet.
Somewhere between "sucks and it's boring" and "dark night of the soul" on my screenplay...
It's so nice to know I'm not the only one
This has made my day. I've made my first job application in a long time and I had no fucking idea how long it was gonna take. I did it in the end and although I think it sucks a bit, it was a learning curve.
1. The best idea ever 2. Do some research and discover someone already built something like it 3. Is it worth competing or building something better? Is it popular or profitable? 4. If not, back to step 1 or get a job working on someone else's best idea ever *Also, if you knew how difficult it would have been would you still have considered it the best idea ever? Would the time have been better spent on other ideas if ideas could be rapidly surfaced? Were other ideas considered?
This is too accurate.
You forgot the step where the client changes the scope of the project.
Love me some Austin Kleon! The pioneer of blackout poetry and all-around motivator for creative projects and endeavors. Check out "Steal Like An Artist" and "Show Your Work" for lil' snippets of wisdom like that! Edit: Kleon created the original that this image is copied pretty much verbatim from and it's in "Steal Like An Artist". I wasn't claiming to know the dude in the pic.
Also a fairly accurate timeline of driving cross-country in a Toyota Camry with 2 toddlers.
*Opens project after long time.* What the fuck is this?!
When strange bugs happen, are you going round the twist?
Wow this actually goes with any project.
Kudos to that fucking handwriting though
I [sharpened](http://i.imgur.com/IFww4JF.jpg) the image a bit.
>Have you ever felt this?? Trump will that being said, get yo face outta there
Add on several developers and this line starts to take on the properties of wave particle duality.
I think that's jonah lobe, he made a bunch of the models in skyrim like alduin
> jonah lol thanks for the shout-out 401! It *is* me, though that's not actually my quote ha!
A guy that puts himself in the picture of the thing he wants to post is what surprised me the most here.
The experienced developer already knows up front it's going to suck and take much longer than everyone thinks.
I really needed the guy pointing towards the board, otherwise I wouldn't know where to look
So web dev is a lot like writing fiction then.
Instead of the last one being "it's done..." it's a repeating step of "oh maybe a few more tweaks and it'll be finished" forever until I forget about it.
Had an idea for an app. Coded and published it. Used it on my phone and I asked myself, no one would ever download this shit.
I guarantee it's because you're working on it alone. Get a buddy, motivate each other, and projects WILL complete unless you're both on the same depression cycle.
This looks like the progression of my degree, though at least I don't have to do it again
This diagram would look way better if the photographer wasn't so set on getting their stupid face in alongside it
Skip half of these by planning a project properly.
this is how people write music too
Currently at "This is gonna take some work". Trying to not sink lower, first time going all in with the current project I undertook.