This. I was thinking that they had the right idea themselves when they talked about basic research. In basic research, there really is no such thing as failed

This. I was thinking that they had the right idea themselves when they talked about basic research. In basic research, there really is no such thing as failed or wasted work unless you constructed a faulty experiment. Whatever happens, it's all added to human knowledge. Finding out that something is not possible, or not possible this particular way, is still finding out something. If you're thinking that way, then you never worry about wasting work. You're plugging away at a methodical process and none of it is a waste. But you have to be thinking that the job is to perform these steps and record the result, not the job is to discover a miracle. Getting back to software, as for the blank page, just how blank is blank? Are we talking don't even know what industry we want service or what? Because if the page is blank, there are many tools and methods, but they are not all the same. So the first job is not necessarily to vomit any code but to characterize the job and narrow the tool selection to those which optimize whatever you're going to need to do the most. Maybe you have to vomit some code to figure that out, but then that was the job of that code was to find something out, not to be a product.