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I 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 s
by peatmoss 7y ago
I 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.
- peatmoss 7y agoMost times I wouldn’t say it’s important that you go through exactly the same formal process that you’d do if you were planning to publish your own peer-reviewed article. However, in a software engineering context, let’s say that you’re implementing a new library to do something in a new programming language. If other, more established languages had popular libraries that did something similar, I’d systematically catalog what those libraries are, read their user docs, maybe read their source a bit, and certainly try to develop an understanding of what I thought was the right approach. In your own readme, including this information up front, along with why you chose to implement the way you did almost certainly advances the state of the practice. At a minimum you’ll have a record of what influenced your thinking so that, if you come back in the future, you’ll know what other threads may have advanced in the meantime. I’ve thought of this as a way to contribute to open source that isn’t writing code or docs after the fact. Like, imagine you’re a Racket user and you wish there were a library to do X: maybe it’s a worthy contribution just to start a github repository and document the libraries that do something similar, and what you see as good and bad about those approaches. Maybe someone with the bandwidth to write the software will see your documentation and find that it gives them a head start.
- sjg007 7y agoI dunno.. I would ask your advisor for the summary short cut. Literature surveys are kind of a waste of time. You really want to work in a space that has no literature yet! The problem with reading papers is you end up wasting time reading papers!
- zarkov99 7y agoYes, but sometimes research is just safe procrastination and more can be learned, more quickly, by jumping into the unknown and trying to figure it out.
- tictoc 7y agoHow does one differentiate between the two? The mind is very sneaky is it not?
- zarkov99 7y agoIndeed. I theorize that the best approach is a hybrid: jump in, figure out, write something, but step back periodically and read what is out there. True understanding comes from the interplay of these two activities.
- ColanR 7y agoFirst figure out what you need to know, and stop planning /researching when you know it.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThat's the question all those people should be focusing on. Because it's obvious that both stances are correct, yet here we are, discussing an article that pushes one extreme like if it was a natural truth.
- mannykannot 7y agoIf the fact that something could be done badly is a reason for not doing it, nothing would be done - that's the ultimate procrastination.