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This is an incredibly cool write-up, demonstrating a level of technical skill far beyond me. Kudos! I am a little confused by all the "but why" comments here.
by troad 4y ago
This is an incredibly cool write-up, demonstrating a level of technical skill far beyond me. Kudos!
I am a little confused by all the "but why" comments here. Because it's fun! Because it's cool! Because it's full of weirdness, archaisms, and edge cases - working through those is a playful challenge, and conquering them all gives a wonderful feeling of mastery. It doesn't need to be any more 'useful' than any other hobby or game.
- doublerabbit 4y agoI do the same in my brain dumps when coding. For me it stops my mind from wandering and describes to myself why I am writing that function.
- nerdponx 4y agoThis is such a great idea for people who have trouble staying focused. It can help you decide whether to actually spend time on whatever you're doing, or to just dump some ideas to a scratchpad (or your Zettelkasten!) and get back to the actual work at hand.
- ghodith 4y agoFunny, this is the exact workflow I settled on. During pomodoro cycles I brain dump all unrelated things I want to think about into a scratchpad, and then afterwards transfer the ones I'm still interested in into my Zettelkasten. It's been significantly impactful; I actually get work done when I can feel like I don't have to address an idea right away out of fear of forgetting it.
- nerdponx 4y agoI think there are two kinds of "but why" questions: 1. Derisive, insinuating that the project is silly or a waste of time. 2. Inquisitive, actually wanting to know what motivated the creator to do something that most people don't see a value for, and/or would never have thought to bother with. We should discourage the former, but IMO we should encourage the latter.
- acyou 4y agoI think the "Motivation" section is the most important section of documentation. Why is this great and why should we keep reading?
- nerdponx 4y agoAlso true, but I don't think we need to enforce that kind of standard for personal hobby projects. You're not under any obligation to convince people that your project is worth being interested in, unless you specifically want other people to start using it.
- acyou 4y agoYou are right, it's not something that needs to be enforced or demanded on a personal hobby project. You can write documentation and software for yourself, and share it for no particular reason, or write documentation/software for other people, and share it to help others. If it's the latter, you might care that other people read the documentation, because you think it will be useful and helpful and you want to help them. As a non-expert, I like having the main and most relevant use cases and underlying motivations of authors and users made obvious. For me, having specific use cases in mind makes documentation easier to read and interpret. If I were an expert in a field and felt the motivation for the documentation was obvious and self-explanatory, I might not feel the need to have it explicitly articulated. When I write documentation, I often need to refer to the Motivation to stay motivated and stay on target. What are all the great outcomes that are going to come about as a result of the documentation existing? If I didn't have those in mind from the outset, I might not want to write the docs.