Just Build It...
blog.stephaniestimac.com
blog.stephaniestimac.com
It helps me to avoid getting overwhelmed with complexity and, as a nice side-effect, to avoid premature abstraction and optimization. Most of all, it helps me (as mentioned in the article) to actually build something. It is also quite satisfying and motivating to quickly get to a state where your product already works and to build on top of that, making something better that already works.
I used to work like that when I began programming, because I just wanted to solve a problem for myself and put it out there as quickly as possible. I had to re-learn this way of thinking as my ambitions grew and as I wanted to make things “perfect” and be “professional”.
Of course, in this approach lies the danger of accumulating features and complexity, so it is important to keep the focus on the problem or the “essence” of what the product is supposed to be.
The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is."
If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latter group.
In my last company, we were trying to ship refactors and improvements at the same time, and it inevitably broke down horribly when we'd discover some requirement that had originally never been documented or built in some component. So the scope for shipping would change from a one-to-one refactor with incremental iteration in subsequent sprints, to many cycles of QA and fixes before even minor design improvements could be shipped.
It's characteristic of every dev team I've been on that's tried to use off-the-shelf agile practices, because there's no risk tolerance at any level higher than IC. Everyone's afraid of how they'll appear, and nobody trusts anyone lower than them on the org-chart.
Wow that is literally the exact opposite of agile.
Like.... There is no worse descriptor for this than "agile"
That’s why a solid, painless, quick rollback story is absolutely vital but underrated for agility. It’s not a big deal if you ship a regression but can roll back quickly. On the other hand, if every release is playing for keeps, you’ll slow down to a glacial pace to try to ship perfection. But perfection is impossible no matter how much process you put in front of it—you will ship a bug some day. So pretending like you can’t ship bugs because you have initial design reviews, multiple code reviews, sign-offs from multiple stakeholders, CI that takes 3 days to run, etc. just makes the day you do ship a big that much more painful.
For example, one of our teams had the requirement "Allow end users to programmatically configure widget xyz". Now, widget xyz has a janky design and a table with 50 columns associated with it.
So what did this team do? They took that internal table definition, made a CRUD api that exposes the whole thing, and moved on.
Tell me, how do you fix something like that like that? They followed the agile route, got an MVP out with hardly any effort on their part. But now we have this API that shows off 20 years of legacy that our end users now depend on.
And to be clear, of those 50 fields, maybe 3 of them mattered to the end user and the rest could have been inferred. But doing that inference is a lot more work as it takes understanding the domain.
A little at a time; continuous refactoring/improvement is a vital pillar of agile. You've got 50 redundant fields that can be inferred but you have to understand the domain to do that? Well, understand the domain a bit, and infer one of them. Then next time you come back to that part of the code do another one.
(I mean, if the table was like that already then it sounds like the API didn't introduce a new problem, it just surfaced a problem you already had)
The problem with this pillar is it's often viewed as nothing more than waste by business. Try arguing with a PM "Hey, we need to actually take a bit of time to redo XYZ because it's really janky" and they'll come back with "Yes, but client PDQ is ready to give us money for this shiny new feature! We don't have time to waste redoing XYZ because it's not currently causing us any problems".
The table going from 1, 2, 10, 20, 50 columns never actually hurt the system. It got nasty looking but ultimately not something you could sell to a manager "Hey, we should address this". So, by the time "Hey, let's expose this" rolled around the institutional will to want to correct anything had long since past.
It's really easy to sell redoing something if it's actively causing harm to the systems, but stuff that's just a bit janky has next to 0 priority (often even negative priority because fixing it might break something).
But much of the time, better or worse laters of bureaucracy in the system come about from these mistakes which will eventually happen, so it's a very valid point, and I do think a lot of the time it's companies building up scar tissue and not being capable of getting the necessary surgery to fix it.
Yes, they do, but also it's an entire department problem and one that the upper bureaucracy doesn't see as an issue. I'm really not surprised this was the route that particular department took. Office politics are fun, though, so sucking at your job often doesn't mean anything if your managers are all buddies.
But before the creation/evolution of that department we already had these sorts of problems. This may just be a "just my company" problem but I don't think it is. After all, from what I know of business management, this sort of "extra staff and rework is waste" mentality seems really pervasive.
No word of a lie, I ran into a colleague from the first company I saw this problem at (and was fired from) years later when I happened to revisit a restaurant I liked in the area. I asked him if he still worked there, and he laughed. Said that they eventually fired the entire department and he stayed on just as a consultant for a bit. Which is odd, because although I was a naive early-twenties kid at the time, I could tell everyone else in that department was quite good at their jobs.
That's an extremely poorly defined requirement, and I would say that's the ultimate source of the issue. Your team took that and made a crud api. Another team might have written a YAML based DSL. Another team might have created an even more complex scheme.
A BA/PM should have pushed back on that and gotten much, much better specificity as to what the users needed to do.
> And to be clear, of those 50 fields, maybe 3 of them mattered to the end user and the rest could have been inferred. But doing that inference is a lot more work as it takes understanding the domain.
Exactly -- except the part about "doing that inference is a lot more work". Compared to recovering from the wrong path the software has taken?
> So what did this team do? They took that internal table definition, made a CRUD api that exposes the whole thing, and moved on.
> Tell me, how do you fix something like that like that?
That's genius! You can now use your metrics from that API to determine how the users are actually using it to provide more value.
Are they hooking into something they shouldn't? Well then they are missing a feature and that is an opportunity for you to build that feature for them.
What kind of an organisation is going to adopt a packaged management method like that? Cargo cult adoption of practices, language, job titles, consultants, tools and formal certifications... The company that invented agile would never have "gone agile" in 2023.
I'm not saying that agile can't work. I'm saying that an insurance company "adopting agile" is an insurance company buying a trendy management method for their engineers. It matters not if the method is called agile or a 1972 booklet from the USSR. Practices, practiced blindly are rituals.
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...
It (allegedly) happened on a university class.
The Art and Fear authors credit Uelsmann himself as the source of the story; whether I believe he really did it with actual students for a whole semester, on the other hand...
It's a little bit of a "just so" story in any form, though the lesson of repetition is fine regardless of its literal truth.
This is 100 times easier for me than building from scratch. I second guess everything when I start with a blank canvas.
That was my pain point and why I made my extension SnipCSS - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcma...
Usually I can find something "good/close enough" to what I want on some website. I use my extension to rip off that design, start with that as a base, then iterate. Just made this tool the other day https://templates.snipcss.com/tools/free-no-conflict-css-too... using this as the start design: https://www.toptal.com/developers/json-formatter
The way I try and address this is by basically turning off my inhibitions on my first pass of anything. Literally just start spewing stuff, whether its code or writing a tweet or blog post, making a presentation, etc. Then my second pass is with a much more critical eye and I start editing or reworking big chunks.
Rinse and repeat! Has been working for me.
"also don't ever give someone an unsolicited code review on Twitter. It's rude."
Sending an email directly may be welcome. Commenting on PR (if open source) is also probably welcome in most circumstances.
It's the difference between pointing at an ESL speaker and saying they talk funny in a group social situation, versus pulling them aside and letting them know they're using some words wrong.
Some people are OK with being publicly called out, but more people will feel like they're being given constructive feedback rather than publicly called out if you talk to them directly
/s
Sometimes people want the participation and attention that exists on social media without the reason that attention exists.
Of course, advice should always be kind. And allow people to ignore you if they want; this includes not "piling-on" and restating a criticism that has been said by others.
That's literally all they said.
How can you disagree about what one individual says they themselves want?
I would feel horribly patronized in this scenario. I don't go golfing to get better at it, I go golfing to relax. Similarly someone can program and not necessarily want to be better at it. It depends on their goals and desires. Giving someone advice before asking means you have to guess at what their goal even is. In many contexts (work) this is fine but in general it is not.
To answer your question, the reason why someone might reasonably take offense to unsolicited advice is that unsolicited advice is inherently condescending because it implies that the advisor knows more about the topic than the advisee. It also implies that the advisor knows the advisees skill level and goals. It's kinda insulting, and in another way it's almost controlling as the advisor reframes the discussion around "being good at X". I don't want to be good at golf, I want to enjoy my time golfing.
Let’s say you are installing bike seats for your kid, but you attach it in a way that 3 minutes into the ride your child would fall off. A neighbour sees this and comes over, unasked, to tell you you did the straps wrong. Are you now insulted or glad someone taught you something important?
In general the problem about people who feel insulted about things is that it is their own interpretation. Insult lives with yourself. You can choose not to be. Why would you put so much power into other people’s hands?
Don’t get me wrong, I can get insulted, so it is a constant work in progress.
I feel like in your story instead of robots, people would be more like receiving unsolicited advice. A machine is a machine. If you get offended by advice from machines you have totally different problems.
It's still unsolicited, just welcomed.
It also means it doesn't forever sit in the perfecting stage, and perfection is infinity.
For all non trivial projects the line is somewhere in between and nothing is as black and white.
I don't know what I dislike about it. HN font seems better to read. About the homepage:
- Is it all the excess space around the text?
- Is it that "Work Highlights" isn't aligned with anything?
- Is it the background switching that makes feel in 1 case there is a different font or font weight?
- Actually there is 3 background colors and in 1 case the font is even different color: white.
- The "Currently" feels a different font size than anything else. Actually it feels a different font for me.
- And it is not the same color as previous headers.
- The bullet points feel stuffed... or I don't know... the text above is different line height. Or maybe the excess space (doesn't fill the image height)?
I don't know what's right or wrong. Maybe I just like consistency :)
Sorry for the unsolicited part, it's more like I want to learn more myself :)
" Isaac worked with me when I was 24 years old. He wrote and published 400 books. I was sitting in his living room in Lincoln Center in New York City, and I said, “Isaac” — being presumptuous — “how do you go about writing 400 books?” He said, “Here’s the secret.” He pointed to this old manual typewriter. He said, “Every morning, I sit in front of this typewriter at 7:00 am, and I type until noon. It doesn’t have to be good, but I have to keep typing.”
His point (speaking about the other author) was that the book was "unfinished" both in the sense of incomplete, but also "unfinished" in the sense of unpolished; it was a warning that the quality of the writing would not be the quality the readers were used to from that author.
(Which was apropos to include in "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish", since it was also a novel started by Adams and not "finished", in either sense.)
It's a hard thing to do, to just sit and write something you feel is garbage. I think I've mostly managed to get to the point where I can do it for coding, but not really for text yet.
So much advice out there on the internet is really not meant to help you – it's to sell you on content or tools. The best way to learn is by building.
Most of the technology choices you make will be marginal. There are incredibly profitable startups built on PHP. Until you go through the process and see for yourself what a particular approach yields, you won't truly understand it no matter how many books or articles you read.
The only way out is through!
Often you spend half the day learning about the task, then learn or refresh some bit of required technique or knowledge... then you just do it.
In carpentry, engine restoration, cooking or whatnot... this is typical of early days. Every early carpentry project requires some learning. A new cut, a join or glueing method. As you mature in the discipline, the density of novelty and learning decreases.
"Learning" is a bit of a catch all. Learning about the product, library or API might just be literal information gathering. Other "learning" might be skill building, requiring practice and repetition to "learn." EG, brushing up on regex to deal with some misbehaving code.
In any case, we tend to be pretty resistant to openly practicing, or training ourselves. We prefer to err on the "knowledge gathering" side. Or... we do agree to practice, but adopt a low effort "just practice" mentality that isn't effective. Layer these tendencies onto modern work, where the divide between learning and doing is unintuitive and vague... most of us are not practicing enough to do what we want to do.
"Just build" is, IMO, mostly a hack to make us practice with sufficient effort and persistence for learning to happen. If you have a thing you want to build, you need to practice building it. The proficiency you acquire is often more useful and valuable (even for the task itself) then the concrete output... until a much later stage in the game than we intuit.