triplefox

The first thing I do, typically, is write out the requirements.

If I already have requirements, I rephrase them in my own writing.

Then I start sketching out some possible solutions in notes, as brief phrases. I may start writing code at this point, but I continue making notes occasionally.

I've decided, for personal reasons, that the best thing that could be done for gaming today is to grow a community of amateur game developers.

Therefore I'm working on a project - some open-source technology, and a targeted community portal - towards this end. I think there are a number of possible related business models, but at the moment I'm not going to jump for money. It doesn't motivate me well.

I had something of an experience like this in the US system. My mom was overly concerned about my grades because, in her view, the only way to get a good education and "be successful" was to test into the top math+science classes, as that was what my older brother did. (She wasn't able to admit that until last year after I finished college and got a job. My brother is finishing his PhD and now realizes that he doesn't want to research math the rest of his life, he just liked studying it.)

Fortunately, the pressure was far less in my instance, and I ultimately found a satisfactory compromise in college between my own goals and "successful" goals, but the bitter feelings are the same. Learning isn't helped by making it a threatening experience.

I think elitist pursuits are - just economically speaking - a tremendous waste of brainpower, because people are fickle and may move on to other things after investing the time to learn, without making use of their superior understanding.

Where things are accessible to amateurs, the benefits are far greater as a multitude of approaches and perspectives are available to advance the "state of the art."

I think that increasingly, software-based businesses will be starkly divided by the "application" and the "infrastructure" realm. While the former is made by a single person or a small group and runs on preexisting systems, the latter builds and maintains said systems, and has to pull in serious resources to do so.

For the app-writers, it won't just be seed funding anymore - it'll be no funding at all. The most they have to do is pay for some hosting, legal and financial services, but their burn rate will be so tiny as to do it on part-time wages.

As for the remainder, they'll still be operating a traditional startup with real funding needs.

The more I program, the more I write about what I'm going to program.

I haven't gotten to the point of writing my code on paper, though.