I’ve come to appreciate that the last ~20% of the work takes 80% of the time and if I adjust my expectations I can usually get an 80% solution in 20% of the tim

I’ve come to appreciate that the last ~20% of the work takes 80% of the time and if I adjust my expectations I can usually get an 80% solution in 20% of the time. If you cut with the grain you can get a surprising amount done in a short amount of time. Depending on the project, I have a bunch of personal 80% projects that I’m happy with where they are. https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io I could add native language support for other wikis (some people have forked the project and done just that), but it would be that 20% work. I could expand my coverage beyond the “top articles” but it exceeds what I can track in git so I’d either have to use Wikipedia’s API (slow and offloads cost to Wikipedia) or roll my own DB backend. That’s part of the last 20%. I could update the repo to keep it “fresh” but I’d exceed the git object limit on GitHub and have to have some amount of long-running cron based automation. I choose to leave it as is. https://audile.blankenship.io https://audile.blankenship.io I could store previously discovered albums, but I’d need a DB. I could return more than one album at a time, but I’d have to deal with rate limits and cache responses to take load off Deezer. These are all part of that last 20%, so I leave it with one recommendation per page load. For things I plan to monetize or share with others I tread out into that 20%. Like https://persona.ink https://persona.ink For my customer contracts I share the same options with them. I let them know when we are cutting against the grain and where costs are going to balloon. I give them options to reduce cost by adjusting their expectations. I’m happy to charge them for the work, but I’d like to give them the chance to save on my time if they can live with the compromises.