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It’s worth spending weeks on research before wasting years on a hopeless project
- neogodless 7y agoTried to view this in Firefox... Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to ottofeller.com. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
- karmakaze 7y agoFf mobile says: ottofeller.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER But didn't name the issuer. Why?! Likely either a fringe issuer or self-signed cert
- romaaeterna 7y agoIt claims to be Sectigo. Strange. I've switched my team's projects to Let's Encrypt to avoid dealing with Comodo (now Sectigo?).
- gvidon 7y agoOh, crap. I can see the issue in FF68. Sorry about that!
- gvidon 7y agoWhich version of the FF do you use?
- neogodless 7y agoLooks like you got this worked out in a sister thread, but yes 68.0.1.
- peatmoss 7y agoI wish more projects would start with the old grad school approach of doin’ the literature review. Swashbuckling your way into a project usually means falling short of prior art. At a minimum it’s good to know what pitfalls are waiting for you before embarking.
- eitland 7y agoA quote that stuck with me: "A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. "[0] [0]: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoThe programmers creed variant: "Weeks of coding saves hours of planning."
- mattchamb 7y agoHours of debugging can save minutes of reading the documentation
- jammygit 7y agoAs someone who never went to grad school: how would a software consultant or freelancer approach this?
- nostrademons 7y agoYou should at least search Google, GitHub, Maven, NPM, etc. for libraries, SaaS vendors, or published algorithms that do what you're attempting to. "The best line of code is the one you didn't have to write." Though there's a fair bit of subtlety in using them. There's nothing quite as bad as finding a framework that does 95% of what you want it to and will save you years of development effort, building your architecture around it, then getting 80% into development and finding out that there's no way to make it do the remaining 5% reliably and its developers have abandoned it precisely because of that shortcoming.
- noisy_boy 7y agoI barely get a day or two to do some research on a new piece of work e.g. scope the tooling, mental model, checking how well the third-party components integrate etc before I need to provide an "update" at the status check meeting on "where we are". If you say that you are researching more than once, you are told "if you are facing difficulties, maybe xyz can have a look at it". It makes you feel that you are being labelled as slow/not quick enough and basically comes across almost like a threat of your work being assigned to somebody else who doesn't need to research as much.
- tim58 7y agoA lot of this is work culture. You can push back by trying to formalize the research phase. Saying "I'm working on the architecture/design document, we have some known unknowns regarding [foo] I'm hammering out" shows other people in the meeting that you are working towards their problem in a meaningful and structured way. Ultimately, if the people in the org want to push the work to xyz instead I would let them. Maybe xyz is as good as they think, but probably everyone in that room will enter a slog project/feature. When someone makes a threat your default behavior shouldn't be to back down.
- reviel 7y agodefinitely needed this, thanks!
- alexpetralia 7y agoThis is a good answer. What managers dislike is a lack of transparency. "Research" is very vague. How can anyone tell what you were researching, or what the result of it was? A very clear spec doc is a useful tool - almost like writing an essay - to demonstrate what your research uncovered.
- pbh101 7y agoAgreed on the structure part: structuring research is incredibly helpful for guiding the research itself, knowing what’s left to do, and the nice bonus of also making it easier to share the results, both incremental and final. Research is in many ways naturally more unstructured than other dev tasks and people don’t get too much practice at doing or delegating it, so it can be fertile ground for organizational misunderstandings. Structure agreed upon up front can help all that.
- jseliger 7y agoI have met many doctors who say they did essentially no research whatsoever on what being a doctor really entails and what it's like. They spend four years in school racking up six figures in debt, then three years in residency, based on nebulous ideas and media commentary. That is part of the driving reason why I wrote this: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-nurse-or-physicians-assistant-instead-of-a-doctor-the-underrated-perils-of-medical-school/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n...
- Kaibeezy 7y agoSee also: The Law School Scam (The Atlantic, 2014) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/the-law-school-scam/375069/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/the-law...
- sjg007 7y agoUS grad school is the same scam. There’s an argument that only foreigners should compete in it for the green card.
- ConcernedCoder 7y agoIt's literally worth spending weeks doing anything to avoid wasting years doing anything.
- MuffinFlavored 7y agoSay you are looking to start a SaaS platform. What research can you do other than look at web traffic estimates of competitors? It'll be obvious who is big + who is small, but it doesn't help understand... "are these companies actually profitable? What's retention like?"
- gvidon 7y agoI don't think someone will be totally honest to you while saying if they are profitable or not. Before launching SaaS first thing I would do would sell it to someone even before the product is ready :)
- bluetwo 7y agoYou start with the root of the problem and work from there. Know that while competitors might have it right, they also might have it wrong. Talk to people.
- tmaly 7y agoI like the approach Seth Godin talks about in his book This is Marketing. He uses a 4 quadrant chart to plot two qualities of a product. Then plots where competitors fall on those two qualities. For instance cost and durability. Some competitors could be positioned differently say expensive and durable and perhaps there is no competitor that fills the cheap part of the graph. Its a nice way to visualize potential opportunities
- hogu 7y agoThere isn't a good way to know for sure that something is going to work, but there is alot of research you can do that will give you good information. 1. Cold email/linkedin message then speak to 100 potential customers. Attempt presales. You don't actually have to get presales, but that process should give you a good indication for willingness to pay / desired functionality, how people are currently working on the problem, and what language they use to describe their pain (quoting that back to customers is good marketing copy) 2. Build a landing page, run facebook / google ads, find out how much it costs to acquire an email address. Your real CAC will be higher of course, but this is a good starting point. I'm a founder of https://www.saturncloud.io/ https://www.saturncloud.io/. I started with #2, and found it cost 70 cents in advertising revenue to get a click, ~7$ for an email address, and ~$100-$200 to get someone to signup. When we started we were attempting a low touch sales model. Since then we've started focusing on enterprise sales, because the willingness to pay is much higher. We did #1 when moving towards enterprise sales, but should have done that in the beginning.
- dekhn 7y agoWe were taught this in grad school- often simply doing little toy problems on the back of an envelope can convince you that some approach is unlikely to be fruitful. I thought this was a good idea, although after a while I noticed that a number of good ideas ended up getting rejected and decade+ later somebody else tried the same thing and managed to get a Science or Nature paper out of it.
- Anon84 7y agoWith this approach you’re minimizing false positives (wasting time on useless projects) not false negatives (ignoring useful ideas) so it’s not surprising that some ideas you discarded are then successfully explored by others.
- dekhn 7y agoif only we had a way to truly estimate the success of a project- many of the back-of-the-envelope calculations were based on poor assumptions (assume a spherical cow, etc)
- antisthenes 7y agoThere isn't much you can really do when it comes to exploring more useful and potentially successful ideas, because for you (doing the exploring) they will be unknown unknowns, unless you've somehow stumbled upon the domain area before.
- itronitron 7y agothat someone got a Science or Nature paper out of it doesn't necessarily make it a good, or novel, idea
- Kaibeezy 7y agoKaibeezy’s Unique Business Model Axiom: If you have an idea, somebody else already had it. Kaibeezy’s Unique Business Model Corollary: Don’t let that stop you. So many people think they have to have the “killer” version in a category, or they collapse with disappointment when they find out someone else already had their amazing idea. Amateurs. Existing solutions prove a market exists. Take the opportunity to see if the market is interested in your particular formulation. If you can carve out a niche and keep your overhead low, it could become viable or even quietly successful.
- reroute1 7y agoThis axiom sounds contradictory. Maybe if you add the word "probably" someone else had it. Because the fact is that someone HAD to have the idea first, so it's impossible to always apply this axiom. But I get the idea
- Kaibeezy 7y agoAs a modestly successful inventor, I get buttonholed all the time by people wanting advice about their ideas. Some may even be unique, but it doesn’t matter. Uniqueness is far from the major factor in doing something successful with an idea. Yes, the axiom is an intentional exaggeration—cold water in the face—to get their attention and refocus it.
- bluGill 7y agoUniqueness is if anything an anti-pattern to success. If you are really unique that probably means there is no market - either that or there would be a market but the problem is not solved and you are unlikely to make progress.
- allie1 7y agoEven if there isn’t something like the idea, if the problem exists, people are doing workarounds to solve their problem. This is what you need to be looking at.
- dougmwne 7y agoThis is one of those pieces of startup advice that once I learned about it, I started seeing lots of connections to my own life. I think one of the more dangerous things about doing something on your own is the risk that you'll go down the rat hole on something unprofitable or unproductive. Consider that you spend a huge potion of your life on very well-worn paths that were cut by others. From the subjects you study in school to the business models you drive forward at work, everything has been done before by someone else and you are only doing it now because of a sort of survivor bias. The bad ideas and bad approaches have failed or been discarded and the better ideas have turned into Fortune 500 companies and academic departments. Walking those proven paths, you just have to do a reasonable job, follow the formula, and you're not likely to fail. Now lets say you've struck out on your own and you want to do something new that no one's ever been successful at before. Now you're essentially guaranteed failure. There's no more formula to follow. There's no more boss or teacher to tell you you're not on the right track anymore. You can no longer just plug into an existing money-making machine and start spinning, you have to build one from scratch. The best strategy is to get out of failing situations fast before they swallow you up. An analogy from skiing: When you're on the marked trails, everything has a name and difficulty rating so you know what to expect in advance. Hazards have been roped off and the trail is guaranteed to lead to a lodge or a lift. This is life within school and companies. Then you go off-piste and out of bounds. There's no longer any ropes or trail names or safety patrol, just a wild mountain. Some people have been through here before as you can see from the ski tracks in the snow. If you follow those tracks you might be ok. They will probably lead somewhere safe like a road where you can hitch-hike or a valley you can traverse back to the resort. But if you turn instead into the fresh snow where no-one has tracked before, you're in very dangerous territory. Who knows where this leads, hypothermia in a wilderness area, under an avalanche or very likely off a cliff. But it's a whole mountain of fresh snow just for you. This is entrepreneurship.
- pacaro 7y agoI worked on a project where we did the research and it came back saying "meh", or "no", or "only if it had this impossible feature". Our management just discounted the research, "we asked the wrong population" etc, and drove forward with their vision Approx $100m later the project was quietly folded, senior managers who had been promoted during the process quietly moved to pastures new, everyone else given 6 weeks to find something else. I saw the warning signs and left before the crunch, but in hindsight I had concerns that weren't answered from day 1 but I let my enthusiasm allow me to ignore them A learning experience
- xwdv 7y agoThis actually doesn’t work out so nicely in real life, and I can tell from experience. It’s one of those things that sounds obvious, but neglects context. The most valuable projects are always going to be a race. If all your competitors are spending time carefully researching the path they will take, there is an advantage to be gained by skipping research and jumping straight in. If the idea of your project has merit, then competitors will be fumbling to catch up to you, and if the idea was a dud, then you wasted time and money while your competitors sigh in relief and talk sideways about what a fool you were. In these scenarios, the only glory to be gained is by the ones who skip the research and move forward boldly. Moving boldly for some is just dumb luck, and for others it’s intuition. Businesses and startups look for people with intuition, capable of finding repeatable success through some unknown heuristics they have assembled together with their life experience; essentially this is research, but not deliberate research, instead it is a subconscious research. These intuitive people do not need to spend weeks going out into the world and talking to people about a project or reading statistics and case studies. They could simply roll their eyes into the back of their head and draw from a deep well of wisdom to determine if a project is worth pursuing. They give you their answer and that’s it; it’s the final word. A business with one of these people in its ranks has a tremendous advantage in the speed at which it moves, unburdened by the need to do research or question the premise of its ideas. Many people in the valley like to pitch themselves as being one of these people to proselytize a following of investors or employees, but almost all are frauds. You need a mind that has depth and breadth. A person who’s lived all their life in the valley or has simply hopped from one tech job to another is unlikely to ever be one of these people. It takes a very wide range of expensive experiences to become one.
- celticninja 7y agoIs this the corollary of: Remember, a few hours of trial and error can save you several minutes of looking at the README/instructions/manual.
- thomas 7y agoAlternatively, stop looking for reasons not to start something. Start and pivot as necessary. Barrier is low on a side project and higher with someone else’s time and money obviously.
- Zenst 7y agoYes, as the more time invested into research, the less time and the greater accuracy of planning. But like all multivariable situations, a balance is needed. With that planning feeds back into research in that you may hit a cut-off point, that don't mean research stops, it just changes the focus and future research will come into version 2.... As is with software, you hit a time in which you would love to add this and that and tweak this and that, but those end up being patched or version 2.... later on. Like everything, it is a fine balance, no cookie cutter template or formula as every situation is different. But they have comparable factors that you only learn over time and then in niche area's. You also learn to get those balances better and with that, plan ahead more. But do put a price on your passion, more so if you plan to combine that with work. As the later can kill the former just as much as the other way around, get that balance right in a way that works for you.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y agowebkit-user-select: none is fucking cancer
- hwj 7y agoThis reminds me of a quote from Mike Williams (one of the Erlang fathers): > If you don’t make experiments before starting a project, then your whole project will be an experiment.