neodude

Who are you? Are you my twin? I have exactly the same problem with programming, do the little tidying up actions almost reflexively now, AND I climb as well. Absolutely love that climbing all in your head.

Joking aside, I'm a sophomore in college now, and I closely approximate the 'brilliant failure' model (a little arrogant to say that though!). High school was a breeze, but suddenly you can't not do homework anymore. Classes are not going well and either the depression started first or the lazy/bored attitude did; either way, it's a death spiral. Takes a ridiculous amount of brain power to stop it.

Hm that was an impromptu rant, sorry.

Probably the latter. Having Firebug IN the IDE would be invaluable and (r)evolutionary. A lot of the times I 'develop' by writing CSS in Firebug, then copy-and-paste the result into the actual CSS file.

Hm. That means I want a WYSIWYG, actually. Time to fork Firebug?

I have a similar problem. A lot of the time I merely find myself developing infrastructure instead of developing features. Part of the problem is writing in PHP without a framework (or, rather, a semblance of my own); a more significant part, I believe, is that I just really, really like building architecture. In that way, I'm probably being an architecture astronaut.

The key, as you've said already, is managing client expectations. At some point you must have given a timeline, given a prediction for how long you thought something would take you. At some point you must also have deviated from that timeline/prediction; mine, as far as I've identified it to, is being an architecture astronaut. Hence, the first step, I think, is to narrow the problem down to those deviations, and question why you're deviating so. The deviations may even be something useful or necessary. Rather, figure out what is breaking, then step back and look at the whole picture to see what needs to change.

Agile might be the answer here. At the very least, there are several very good ideas you can steal from agile to build your own approach to engineering.

Clearly, CSS is crying out for a good IDE. Not the Dreamweaver/WYSIWYG variety, but serious text editing features that are pretty standard to programming IDEs.

YMMV, but it was absolutely fasinating for me, especially because I spent a significant portion of my teenage life swimming in a team, going to meets, etc. The antidotes in the article - even the subjective ones - resonate so well with my memory of who and how they got faster, and who didn't (in most cases, me), that I'm blown away with the revelations. I can go back and read that article a couple more times and get more and more out of it.

But, YMMV.

There was this guy, I think his first name was Donald..

The best bit of that speech was the business of looking in the mirror every morning and asking if you want to do what you're going to do that day.

The trouble is, I'm going to college, I am saying "no" an awful lot of the time, but I'm not brave enough to quit.

I'm a 20 year old college student - slap bang in the middle of your demographic - and I care they have a crappy OS, enough to move to a Mac. But that might also be because I'm also part of the tech community - by the virtue of reading YC?