3 ms·
One piece of advice I like to give nowadays, is that if you don't know how to get to a goal, then do this: 1) Divide up that goal into pieces. 2) Take
by stcredzero 8y ago
One piece of advice I like to give nowadays, is that if you don't know how to get to a goal, then do this:
1) Divide up that goal into pieces.
2) Take those initial pieces and divide that up.
3) Take one of the bits from 2, and create a lame, incomplete version of it
4) Keep polishing that bit until it's great
The key steps are 3 and 4! It's hard to build even a small production ready component of something, even a very small subpart. However, pretty much anyone can build a lame, insecure, wonky version of that subpart.
An example is the movement syncing system in my MMO. First I went through an "Asteroids in HTML5" tutorial. Then I got hold of a "Chat in Websockets" tutorial. Then I hooked them up in the lamest way imaginable, then kept on iterating.
The very hardest part is 4, of course. In order to do that part, you have to know what it is you don't know. A good Comp Sci education gets you a good ways there. (Warning: If your profs and TAs keep telling you "you don't need to know [X]" because libraries/etc take care of that for you, you need to figure out if they're only saying that because they don't know themselves. If on the other hand, they give you some background information about when you do need to know [X] then that's valuable information.)
- ghaff 8y agoA version of that is one of the more useful tidbits of advice I got from GTD. I'm not a big fan in general but there are a few tidbits and that's one of them.
- bglazer 8y agoReformatted list for mobile: 1) Divide up that goal into pieces. 2) Take those initial pieces and divide that up. 3) Take one of the bits from 2, and create a lame, incomplete version of it 4) Keep polishing that bit until it's great
- vtange 8y ago4 can also be sorta solved by a lot of 1-3. Outside things you can learn from a CS class there is a lot of stuff out there that is poorly documented where the only good way to do 4 is to run many small experiments to know what constitutes an improvement and what doesn't.
- Jill_the_Pill 8y agoSpeaking as someone writing a dissertation, I am here, at the end of 4, with a nice, shiny, well-polished bit that I am really proud of and a mountain of crap still to deal with! It's really hard to go back and pick up the next bit, but it's due so soon . . . .
- tom-- 8y agoGreat advice, similar to the concept of building an "MVP" as a solo programmer. If you're too motivated then you'll have all these specs and wear yourself out thinking about the details - aiming to instead build a lame minimal version helps a lot with that.