11 ms·

How to build quickly

• jaakl 2y ago
  I wish it would work with actual building building projects…
• ziotom78 2y ago
  Something similar to this is presented with much more details in Zerubavel's “The clockwork muse”, a highly recommended book.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    Frankly, this article might be better because it's very short and encourages you to go out and put it into practice immediately. Which is arguably more valuable than reading an entire book to make the same point.
    • ziotom78 2y ago
      I wouldn't say that this article and the book just "make the same point". Zerubavel devotes an entire chapter to explain how to get a good estimate of the time required to complete the project, another chapter provides tips about how to track progress efficiently, etc.
• jumploops 2y ago
  This strategy can be applied to learning as well. The concepts are very similar to those presented in “How to Read a Book”[0]. The general gist is: create a mental outline of the book/material (via the table of contents), dive into interesting chapters, resurface to the outline, dive again, etc. This strategy is useful for quickly building a mental model and using your own interest as the guiding light. Similar to building quickly, the focus is on your attention/what’s most important, rather than traversing from the beginning to the end serially. Great post! [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
  • TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    How to Read a Book, is ironically one of my favorite books. I attribute a lot of my ability to learn to this book and a teacher in high school that forced us to read and understand it.
    • sourcepluck 2y ago
      Can you explain the irony there? I don't get it.
      • Vinnl 2y ago
        Presumably they had to read it without knowing how to read a book, and yet they were still able to appreciate it.
  • nrvn 2y ago
    In the top directory of my improvised library of electronic books, papers and pdf prints of valuable web pages there are three uncategorized files: - How to read a book by Adler - How to read a paper[0] - How to study[1] Serves as an entrypoint and gatekeeper. Reminds me every time how to spend my time effectively there. [0] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf [1] https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howtostudy.html https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howtostudy.html
  • dmvdoug 2y ago
    It’s just the hermeneutic circle at work, nothing magical.
• bckr 2y ago
  I like this idea a lot! I’ll try it today. I think a version of this is how I, and most professionals(?) already work. But I do believe my process can be sharpened.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  This message is suspiciously like being told to draw the outline of an owl then draw the rest of the fucking owl. https://seths.blog/2014/01/how-to-draw-an-owl/ https://seths.blog/2014/01/how-to-draw-an-owl/ The word recursively does a lot of work in the post. Every project I go into thinking I can do it quick and it never works that way because the minimal viable or minimum lovable thing is a long way from the minimum actual concept of what I have in mind. I feel that I need to build enough that the user is engaged with it. I feel like those first explorers willing to try out a new thing are incredibly valuable and their attention should not be wasted on the outline, but they should be presented with the owl.
  • bdcravens 2y ago
    It feels like the article is describing how to draw an owl, but in reverse. You know what the owl should look like, and you simplify all the way down until each step is little more than a tiny pencil mark.
  • alehlopeh 2y ago
    The first explorers will to try a new thing, as you say, will also be quick to try the next new thing. So they’re probably less valuable than you’d expect.
  • yard2010 2y ago
    Just like that episode in SpongeBob in which SpongeBob tries to teach Squidward how to draw a perfect face.
  • spencerchubb 2y ago
    The post is meant for people who already know how to draw an owl, and want to draw owls quicker.
    • frostsnap 2y ago
      owl drawing speedruns
    • andrewstuart 2y ago
• captainkrtek 2y ago
  This is a great article that summarizes a method I’ve already used for my work over the years. When writing a new project from scratch ill make a bunch of structure (defining modules, writing pseudo code) then start to fill things out piece by piece. Often times ill need to adjust the structure as I go but helps for building a mental model of a new project (at least for me)
  • 3abiton 2y ago
    Do you mind sharing a concrete example of one your project s?
    • captainkrtek 2y ago
      Nothing open source specifically to share, if you were looking for that kind of concrete example.
    • 1659447091 2y ago
      not OP, but I do something similar with polylith[0]. Example structures [1] I'll create the base directories(e.g. www, api, auth). Then the components (e.g config, data, geo, mailer, utils, web etc) In each component I'll make a readme.md with what the component should do. Sometimes this leads to large components and when that happens I break the component directory into smaller ones (e.g. web-client, web-server, web-routes, web-middleware etc) and add a readme to those. Then (what I planned to do but usually skip) add function names to the interface file based on the readme, then work on the implementation (I usually end up going straight to this and wish I had created the interface "guide" cause now I've gone off track and need to clean it up) Not sure if this is a common way to polylith, or if I'm doing it wrong. It helps me keep track better than trying to search through outlines and notes that are scattered all over the place, or in an app I dont feel like opening or logging into, usually ending with me re-writing the same thing 2-3+ times. [0] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith [1] https://cljdoc.org/d/polylith/clj-poly/0.2.20/doc/production-systems https://cljdoc.org/d/polylith/clj-poly/0.2.20/doc/production...
      • 2y ago
• tbm57 2y ago
  I'm not as much of an overhead strategist, but I do have a rule that I follow that matches this article: if I hesitate to start working on a problem because it seems too difficult, it's because that problem has not yet been broken into small enough parts.
  • theZilber 2y ago
    I agree, I follow the same principle. Also i would like to extend it to - "if you slow down when working on a problem, you might have stumbled upon something unexpected, identify it, and break it down.
    • macintux 2y ago
      I have a similar rule when writing documentation. As soon as I find myself writing something in the passive voice, I know I’ve hit part of the system I don’t really understand. “This event happens” instead of “subsystem A triggers this event”.
      • Keysh 2y ago
        Nitpick: “This event happens” is not in the passive voice. “This event is triggered” is in the passive voice — and so is “this event is triggered by subsystem A”. (What you probably mean is “writing something vague or lacking agency”.)
  • layer8 2y ago
    I tend to hesitate because I know exactly that it will be a lot of long and difficult work to break everything down into small enough parts, of which there will be a whole lot, and work through them and integrate them all.
• kpw94 2y ago
  The author provides an example of the bad "Loading bar writing" but unfortunately not a good example of what they call "Outline speedrunning writing" pg, who's good at writing essays, does provide a good example of the latter, with https://byronm.com/13sentences.html https://byronm.com/13sentences.html. This is the writing process that lead to https://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html https://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html. (the https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences?doomed=true https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences?doomed=true URL on pg's blog is a now a dead link. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993060).
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    The other provides a very good example in one of the video illustrations, with the left hand side showing "loading bar" writing and right hand side simultaneously showing "outline speed running" writing.
  • gchamonlive 2y ago
    What I do for my blog is I write everything at once. Then I figure out where to put images, then I publish it! It makes me go back and read it carefully since I have already published it, and then I polish, rewrite sections and add stuff that I missed.
    • _heimdall 2y ago
      I have done something similar on the past and I was very happy with the results. At the time I was starting up a consulting business and got the first few gigs directly from engagement with my blog. I also time boxed myself when writing. I wouldn't write unless I had a really clear topic in mind, then I'd give myself an hour to get it published. A few times I ran out of time and ended it with a "follow-up post coming soon to dive into ___" type message and that worked just fine.
      • gchamonlive 2y ago
        Follow up posts are important! It takes the pressure off having to cram everything into a single publication. Nice!
• burakemir 2y ago
  Really appreciate the bits in the article about identifying what is fundamental and correcting misevaluations. Making an outline is also important for writing. However doing research also has its place. See this here https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howtostudy.html#makeoutline https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howtostudy.html#makeoutlin... (also previously discussed on HN)
• jimbokun 2y ago
  This is incredibly simple yet incredibly powerful, and something that everyone who becomes proficient at delivering things of value learns eventually, but is rarely taught so succinctly. By the way, for the programming case, this is a big part of the reason functional programming is so powerful. Avoiding shared state allows you to write your outline of smaller and smaller pieces, then write each piece as a stateless function, then pipe your data through a graph of these functions. With other programming paradigms, you can't just knock out all the little pieces without thinking about the other pieces because the state is all tangled up. Which slows you down. It's surprising how very simple the individual components can be, even for very complex systems, when following this approach.
  • intelVISA 2y ago
    Yes. Ideally a codebase is just a monorepo of pure functions and apps are simply the control flow that weaves them. Write reusable libraries not microservices (silos). Sadly incentives are not aligned for this at scale - easier to buy cloud SaaS n+1 whose sales team insist "this $badware solves a Hard Problem" while your devs sit in ceremonies all day.
    • jimbokun 2y ago
      That's why Paul Graham started Y Combinator and handed the entrepreneurial reins to the developers instead of the project managers and MBAs and made billions in the process.
      • intelVISA 2y ago
        maybe that was true once, as I understand it current YC is just a finishing school for t1 grads to pad the CV between graduation and working as a "thought leader" (lol)
  • jahewson 2y ago
    I’m not so convinced that this is a property of functional programming as much as simply good programming. I’ve seen functional programs that pass around huge data structures that couple functionality. I’ve never seen the benefit of performing elaborate monadic dances to avoid state that would have been simpler to represent in a non-functional language.
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  This really works. When I used to work at big tech, I had a reputation for being incredibly fast and this is the method I used. This is also one of the reasons why I never moved away from Workflowy as an outlining tool. Nothing else has come close to it. If I have to add one thing, it is that when you are recursively building your outline, it might grow really big and that might overwhelm you so I recommend a pruning step where you prune some of the nodes to make the overall outline tighter as a final step before proceeding on building. But do not worry too much and cut nodes ruthlessly. Often times you can get stuck at this point if you think too much.
  • karolist 2y ago
    Intrigued by your Workflowy mention. Any resources where I could learn your style of workflow with it?
    • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Honestly I keep things pretty simple. Just the fast outlining features and the "mirror"[1] is what I use the most to mirror the current "speedrun" on the top level for next day so when I come in I don't worry about what to start. [1] https://workflowy.com/feature/mirrors/ https://workflowy.com/feature/mirrors/
• nrvn 2y ago
  I call it “PDCA over progressive JPEG” method. The most fascinating thing about human intellect is how we all land in the same places, we just give them different names upon discovery.
• teo_zero 2y ago
  This is a good way to maximize speed. I'm not convinced it's also a good way to master quality. Rushing ("speedrunning") to a first working version may force you to choose sub-optimal paradigms (algorithms, data types, etc.) that you won't have the time or the will to correct later. I'd even postulate that's why we have so many crap applications today that are first on the market but slow, inefficient and user unfriendly. If premature optimization is the root of all evils, totally disregarding it leads to painful refactoring.
  • lee 2y ago
    I think it's the opposite. I think quality often comes from evolution and iteration. There've been so many projects where I get stuck because I want to maximize quality, so I get writer's block. The worse, is that sometimes you'll try to perfect something on your project that ultimately isn't of great value. Building something quickly, and then iterating to perfect it seems to work for many people.
    • RamblingCTO 2y ago
      And what many people of either side forget: both are not a one size fits all. There are some things that need planning up front (a car or a rocket) and some things can be done agile and iteratively. Likewise, some things can't be made via solopreneurship/indiehacking and some things can't be achieved with classic VC-backed entrepreneurship. There's a time for both.
      • halfcat 2y ago
        Are the car/rocket that different? There’s the stories of college professors who split their class into two groups, one group that is graded on quality of a single photo/pottery submission, and the other group graded solely on quantity of work produced, and the group tasked with producing quantity always produces higher quality. I guess I don’t see why building a car or rocket would be different, other than we now know how to do it well. When people were first building rockets, it was just a blooper real of failures. Is there some distinction along figuring out the theory/physics, versus figuring out the application, real world, material science angle? Like I could see spending a long time on the theory side, but once that’s understood, it seems like figuring out which materials can produce the required physics is quick iteration’s bread-and-butter.
• allenu 2y ago
  This is how I work on my projects as an indie dev. When I start working on something significant (a new feature, for instance), I'll create a markdown file that has a summary of what I'm trying to achieve and then a TODOs section which turns into this massive outline of all the tasks that I'll need to do to complete the work. At first, the outline just has a few tasks that are fairly high-level, but as I dive into each one, I add more nested sub-tasks. The nesting keeps going until I end up with sort of leaf nodes that can be done without depending on other tasks. This gives me a nice visual of how complex some tasks are versus others. I generally prototype and design the implementation at the same time, and having this outline gives me a place to "dump" tasks and other work I'll need to do later, and you do often encounter more work than you expect, so an outline makes it easier to find a good "parent" for the task. Having a big outline also lets me jump around from high-level design to low-level implementation easily as well, which you need if you're prototyping and trying to find the right shape for your solution. It's great as a motivator too since I can see when I complete something big when I check off a parent task that has a lot of nested children. I find a simple text file outline like this is so much more convenient than say an app or a web UI since I can just jump around the file and cut and paste outlined sections and indent or un-indent them to re-parent them. (Having to use something like JIRA to do this would be way too slow, especially when you're in a flow state.)
  • ukuina 2y ago
    What do you do when an idea changes and now there are dozens of nested entries that need to be changed to match?
    • allenu 2y ago
      Generally, with this type of work (where I'm trying to go fast), I have to be flexible, so I will often just let nested tasks "die off" after I've found alternative ways of solving the problem or I've changed the idea a bit. Sometimes I'll delete the nested entries outright, but usually I'll just keep them around until I get to a point where I'm close to completing the feature and then I'll re-visit them to see if they still apply or if I need to reincorporate them into the new design.
    • 2y ago
• layer8 2y ago
  In particular if you have to build on existing systems, a top-down approach doesn’t always work well, because the overall design may well depend on details of the existing parts you have to integrate with. In that case, starting with prototyping a vertical slice of the functionality can be the better approach.
  • prmph 2y ago
    Exactly. I've found that even with a greenfield project, there is the tension between keeping things simple and avoiding fully-engineering code so as to quickly get to an MVP, and the fact that code that is under-engineered is creating technical debt that becomes more ossified the more you build on top of it. My current thinking on a solution to this conundrum is this: try to craft the best architecture and engineering you can up-front _vertically_, but drastically reduce the workload by paring things down _horizontally_.
    • bordercases 2y ago
      Indeed, this seems to be the insight around vertical slice architecture? https://www.jimmybogard.com/vertical-slice-architecture/ https://www.jimmybogard.com/vertical-slice-architecture/
• spencerchubb 2y ago
  Has anyone trained an LLM to do this? Start with high-level ideas, and recursively fill in more detail. As opposed to generating text left-to-right
  • tazu 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure LLMs have to generate text left-to-right, but there was a screen recording floating around that had "multiple cursors" of text generation at once, where it looked like the LLM was filling in a grid of text, so to speak. I'll see if I can find it.
    • spencerchubb 2y ago
      There are LLMs that are trained to fill-in-the-middle, particularly code editing LLMs. There is nothing inherently required about left-to-right.
  • ghnws 2y ago
    At least OpenAI creates more noise than useful output if you try to make it tackle a problem this way.
• amelius 2y ago
  This is just top-down design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%E2%80%93up_and_top%E2%80%93down_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%E2%80%93up_and_top%E2%8...
  • p0nce 2y ago
    Sometimes called https://wiki.c2.com/?TracerBullets https://wiki.c2.com/?TracerBullets
• throwaway63467 2y ago
  I think it’s often called the “tracer bullet principle” as well. Get a full version of your system working quickly from end to end, then improve each part incrementally. Powerful stuff indeed, also for your motivation and sense of accomplishment. Nothing sucks the joy out of work more than building and building and not getting any feedback.
  • danjl 2y ago
    We used to say "get the scaffolding of the entire app done as quickly as possible, and then iterate."
• dangoodmanUT 2y ago
  Well explained, people always ask how I get projects done so fast over the weekend, but i haven't really been able to explain. this is bascially how i do it if you look at my notion doc for the idea, and the first commits of the codebase
• og2023 2y ago
  I really prefer the "progressive JPEG" name for this method.
• yen223 2y ago
  If you do Kotlin, the TODO() function is very useful.
• localfirst 2y ago
  im gonna try this out over the coming weeks and report back this could be the most powerful thread ive come across on HN
• pan69 2y ago
  For my personal projects I use a very similar approach. However, I find this technique difficult to do with a group (more than 3 people).
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    Its trickier to scale for sure. I have actually seen something very similar work really well at an early startup. The team was around 5-6 people and fully remote at the time. The real key is communication and trust. It only worked well for us because we communicated frequently, the CTO/lead was really good at acting as a conduit between everyone working on related projects, and we all really offered each other the trust to let each other run with it and adjust on the fly. It was really common for us to go into a week with a clear idea of what the next feature to build was, only to end the week with the person working on it finding a different path or a reason not to build that at all, often with an alternative to propose. We'd discuss it as a team when needed, but it was always clear that the person who was working on it was the expert on it at the moment and had a lot of sway in direction for that feature. It isn't easy, and it did actually fall apart when the team scaled to 10+ people, but there may have been ways we could have adjusted and avoided that too.
• tamimio 2y ago
  I do that in a similar way. I start doing all parts at the same time, going back and forth until it’s done. It’s not a perfect approach though. Two downsides I sometimes encounter are: dependency, when most or some of the work or scope depends solely on perfecting another part, and if the work is complicated, you can get extremely overwhelmed to the point you don’t know where to start or even start at all.
• sexy_seedbox 2y ago
  After reading the article, it made me realise this is why Power Automate and most of those low-code platforms are inefficient as they force you to do things "loading bar" style.
• tzs 2y ago
  I did something like that the first time I had to write a device driver, but I did it kind of stupidly. It was in college and I had a part time job doing doing system administration and programming for the high energy physics department. They had an RX02 8" floppy drive that they wanted to use on their VAX 11/780 which was running Unix/32V and I was assigned to write the driver. I basically started with a C file that just had empty functions for all the functions that I knew Unix expected a driver to have, and then started filling those functions with comments recording what I had figured out that they had to do. Each started with just a few high level comments. Then I'd add more comments breaking those down, and so on, until I finally had all the information I'd need in there and could start coding. That's when I then did something stupid. As I started implementing the things the comments described I replaced the comments with the code. I got about half way through before I realized that I should adding the code below the comments rather than replacing the comments.
• truetraveller 2y ago
  This is almost a 100% "divide and conquer", but a good article with concrete examples. Definition : "A divide-and-conquer algorithm recursively breaks down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions to the sub-problems are then combined to give a solution to the original problem."
• matheusmoreira 2y ago
  > DO NOT PERFECT ANYTHING UNTIL DONE > without caring about quality AT ALL I really need to master this. I spend absurd amounts of time thinking about the littlest things. It can take a long time for me to mentally accept that the code is fine and ready to be committed to the repository and published.
• begueradj 2y ago
  There is the spirit of "divide and conquer" in this method. Which thing is good. However, I do not know how to follow this advice: "DO NOT PERFECT AS YOU GO. This is a huge and common mistake" because, when you develop something critical and apply TDD, testing actually is a synonym of perfecting your approach to solving an issue. Not to mention that testing comes before code itself: it pushes you to think carefully, and come out with the best strategy before iterating any further.
  • mbivert 2y ago
    Well, for example, one could not systematically test everything in the first pass but a few things, and then come back later to write more tests. The first draft can, should even, be sketchy: it doesn't have to work all the way through; one can think of it as a prototype to help you understand the problem better[0]. It can even be discarded, for example if it's too far away from what is actually needed. In that setting, TDD might be more suitable for a second or a third pass, once you have a solid grasp of the code's structure. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_pilot_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_pil...
• tomjen3 2y ago
  This sounds like a really good idea, but I wonder if it works when you are writing to think. Like when PG writes essays, could this work for that?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• compilaton 2y ago
  Good advice, but it also depends on the size of the project. For a very large project you may have to do it in phases, i.e. start with a very high-level breakdown, and then proceed with phase 1 and park whole sub systems for later.
• 5350-uiop-1130 2y ago
  loading bar = answering questions outlining = asking questions i think the education system encourages the loading bar style. we are taught how to answer questions. i think AI will push education more towards the second type where the emphasis on asking questions. like in a tech interview, instead of asking you some leetcode puzzle, i will ask you to ask me questions about the subject to demonstrate your knowledge. kind of socratic style.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    yeah. there's a place for coding interviews but I'm lucky in that the one I give is basically tell me about something you know a lot about, and find how strong people are at their strengths.
• jebarker 2y ago
  Sadly for me I don't find execution on a clear idea to be the problem most of the time in my work. It's choosing the right idea to execute on that's hard.
• idk1 2y ago
  What's interesting about this is, I have always done what the author describes and I just assumed when people wrote (for example) an essay, they would outline all the points and the structure first and then go and fill in each section and refine it over time. Same with ideas and projects, I would do rough outlines, then add fidelity. Same with programing, I'll make an outline and go and refine it all. It's strange, I assumed this so strong I never thought anyone would ever start writing and essay from the beginning without considering more of it, similar to just starting projects or code, I guess they do and it works really well. What's the break down of people's approches to things here, which bucket are you in?
  • smu 2y ago
    As a hobby project, I started a market research/overview of the Belgian cybersecurity ecosystem [1]. This required me to write a lot more than before, although I've always enjoyed writing. In the beginning, I wrote beginning -> end, with just a high outline in my mind. Now, I write bullets first and then expand into paragraphs. This has helped me write a lot quicker and I think the articles have become easier to read (which matters a lot online, where everyone reads diagonally). [1] https://becyberscape.com https://becyberscape.com
  • diggan 2y ago
    > It's strange, I assumed this so strong I never thought anyone would ever start writing and essay from the beginning without considering more of it, similar to just starting projects or code, I guess they do and it works really well. It really depends on the task/text at hand. With some things I set out to do, I know I want to reach a concrete goal, then it's easy to do an outline first with the finish point being the known goal, then fill out the middle-pieces. But at other points, you're not 100% sure what the goal is. Then starting from the beginning and just going with the flow until you reach something that feels like the goal is the way to go, and you'll adjust as you go along. Other times a mix between the two is optimal, where you think you knew what the goal was, but as you're half-way of filling out the outline, you see that another goal would be better fitted, and you adjust. Or you realize what the goal was all-along as you're nearing the finish, and you go back and adjust. Basically, there is no single path/process that fits all types of problems or people even. You try out different things until you find the way(s) that fit you and the stuff you typically handle.
• dmvdoug 2y ago
  And here I was, having been led to believe there’s No Silver Bullet. :( Also lol at the comment that speedrunning and iteration lets you get the junk out of the way so you can really focus on where quality matters… a paragraph away from saying speedrun and iterate and then feel good about being 90% done while you sit around twiddling with the title bar styling.
• andai 2y ago
  I think there's tremendous value in keeping and publishing the outline itself. I know this because I just spent a week turning a book back into an outline and discovered that there was a great demand for it.
• p0nce 2y ago
  Yet another word for "top-down" design.
• gizmo 2y ago
  This reads like a strategy for creating filler content. If you have to write a school essay an outline helps you churn through all the BS. By contrast, when you try to write something meaningful almost all effort goes into two things (a) figuring out what you actually have to say and (b) finding the right words to express it. School essays are written by people who don't have anything to say. Intro fluff. Chapter one fluff. Conclusion fluff. It's not real writing. You can speedrun it because no thinking is involved. The same applies to fluff software, but only to fluff software. If you have to create a page with a dozen buttons with a bunch of click handlers, hook those up to basic AJAX calls, then yes, you can speedrun that as well. Because it's extremely easy work that involves no thinking. Many things in life are kind of mundane and tedious. Fake school work, taxes, cleaning, ironing, to give just a few examples. And having strategies to blast through that kind of work effectively is useful. But these strategies absolutely unhelpful when you're trying to do anything creative or difficult. You can't write a great spy novel with an outline like: 'introduce spy character', 'successful mission 1 in present time', 'flash back to failed earlier mission', 'introduction of big bad guy', 'flash back to tragic backstory', 'spy gets assigned special mission only his handler knows about'. Filling out an outline like this produces an uninspired, boring, formulaic trash. You end up with bad airport reading, the equivalent of AI slop. To give another example: PG spends MONTHS on a single essay. He is not bottlenecked by a missing outline. Speedrunning the wiring process doesn't help. Figuring out exactly what you want to say is the hard part. Putting words on paper is trivial in comparison.
  • eaglefield 2y ago
    I think that's an overly uncharitable read on this approach. Lots of tasks that have difficult thoughts, that need to be thought before they can be completed, also have phases in which work just has to be done. I'm in the middle of collaborating on an article for submission to a physics journal. I wouldn't term it filler work, but most of the complex thoughts on the problem have been thought through and the work right now is creating a coherent story that goes over our results. An outline method would work fine for this part of the project. As for the spy novel, i think the outlining is actually quite similar to how Sylvester Stallone described his writing process[0]. You wouldn't fill the outline with generic beats, you would put in your basic plan for the story. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xqfkVNwEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xqfkVNwEU
• twelvechairs 2y ago
  2 counterpoints - if you are pushing technical boundaries you may need to prove something is achievable before you go back and do the comparatively easy stuff (build the website, set up the company etc.) - As context switching creates a huge cognitive load it can be useful to create discrete chunks of work and not just jump around all the time.
• DelaneyM 2y ago
  I’m constantly amazed at how differently I learned to do things from my father than from school. My father had all sorts of approaches similar to this, and it’s how I learned to write essays (outside-in) and research (inside-out), and which I later applied to programming. It made school trivial and fun, and it’s what I’m teaching my kids.
  • aswegs8 2y ago
    Sounds interesting. Can you provide some more examples?
    • rkhassen9 2y ago
      Delaney - I second this. Can you write a book on this? Blog posts. Podcasts? I’d read/listen to them all.
      • alentred 2y ago
        I think the book is "How to Solve It" by Polya, I mean it. The skills are transferable.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• lackoftactics 2y ago
  I've been diving into the science of learning, and the blog author clearly knows their stuff. For those intrigued by this field, here are some fascinating concepts worth exploring: Bloom's Taxonomy (absolute game-changer), Inquiry-Based Learning, Deep Cognitive Processing & Higher-Order Thinking (closely tied to Bloom's Taxonomy), Generation Effect & Testing Effect, Deliberate Practice, Interleaving, Metacognition, Cognitive Load Theory, Problem-Solving Techniques: First Principles Thinking, Second-Order Thinking, Socratic Questioning, 5 Whys, Inversion, Divide and Conquer Each of these concepts can seriously level up your learning game. Happy googling/using llm!
  • brailsafe 2y ago
    Given the disaster that can be both google and llm, do you have any specific pieces of writing you found particularly high quality?
    • lackoftactics 2y ago
      I like the channel by Benjamin Keep https://www.youtube.com/@benjaminkeep https://www.youtube.com/@benjaminkeep
• mbforbes 2y ago
  For me, this approach works great with one enormous exception: I must already know exactly what I'm going to write about. I have tried outlining my writing countless times. But inevitably, the real work of thinking meticulously comes with the writing itself. In composing prose at the finest level of detail, I discover the true shape of the topic through its nuance. I always throw out my outlines, no matter how many times I have iterated on them. My high level thinking couldn't sufficiently understand the topic. PG expressed this well: writing is thinking, at least for some of us.
  • passion__desire 2y ago
    This is classic. Just move up and down the ladder of abstraction or a tree, collapse a node if its children are ok. If not, expand, fix issues, collapse it and move to another node in the tree or graph. https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
• mackross 2y ago
  I find programming outside-in ends with a better design and is generally faster than inside-out. Similar experience with the rest of the advice.
• zikohh 2y ago
  Another term for this is delivering vertical slices. I like the way this explains that.
• adriano_f 2y ago
  I don't promote often enough, but my writing platform is basically built for working this way: https://gingkowriter.com https://gingkowriter.com (came up with the concept when struggling to write my PhD thesis) Hope it helps!
  • swah 2y ago
    Maybe you should, I was trying to find this for weeks now after first seeing and then forgetting the name :)
• ankit-ab 2y ago
  Amazing read
• nemesis17 2y ago
  This is great. Top-down break down followed by bottom-up building. Resonates of the approach advocated by Paul Graham for building software in the book On Lisp.
• WobblyTyre 2y ago
  I have already been doing this. My problem is that I somehow obsess too much over the Outlinining and by the time I come to filling in the outlines, I lose steam at about 30%-40% completion mark. Then, it feels very boring to finish up the filling of outlines and I get a feeling that dragging myself over a bed of gravel is easier than finishing up the whole thing.
• MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  There are a few missing steps: 3b. Realize that your outline is wrong. You did not fully understand the problem when you wrote it. Go back to step 1. 5. Realize that you are never completely done. You will not go back and perfect. The result is... better than not making an outline, but it's hardly a game-changing approach. I'm reminded of something that Mike Bloomberg wrote in his book: Make a detailed plan for your work. Write down every detail until you're satisfied that you know how to proceed. Then throw the plan away, because it is now worthless.
• bgdnpn 2y ago
  summary: do some sort of breadth-first, remember "premature optimization is the root of all evil"
• tpoacher 2y ago
  This is top-down design presented as slapdashery-as-a-virtue. Except you can also do top down design without the slapdashery, and it will usually be equally fast and a lot better. I agree about top-down design vs "progress-bar" design though (I do like this term!). But of course, there's nothing stopping you from creating slapdash progress-bar code either. Which is the worst possible outcome, obviously.
• digitalmaster 2y ago
  Sounds similar to breadth-first coding.
• akullpp 2y ago
  I do this for writing, whether it's a book, an article or a D&D campaign. For me it's not about speed at all, it's the natural way my mind works and if I try to do this linear, line by line, I face blockades soon in the process.