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I work on what is most exciting to me and then switch when the excitement wears off, switching back again when the excitement comes back. If nothing is exciting, if there's resistance (usually from lack of sleep, lack of exercise) then I focus on restoring my routine, and working on something easier like copywriting, email, invoice admin etc. until the excitement for something else wells up again. But I keep working. Often you need to just press on before the excitement comes back. In the long term, I pick technologies I'm excited in, even if they bring short term costs. Connecting the dots, this process has lead to near-perfect strategy in hindsight. This is counter-intuitive, but embracing NIH has actually made me a better programmer. It's the spirit of vertical integration. It's taught me how to do things and developed my understanding. Rather than using say an SMTP client, if I don't know how it works I dive in and write one myself. It costs the project in the short term, but in the long term the project at least has one more programmer who understands the nuances of another protocol. Imagine a Google that outsourced their filesystem, data center, server racks, JS engine, browser, caching, proxying, map/reduce, machine learning, DNS, etc. Would they be as good as the Google of today? That's what separates IT from hackers. IT configure and use existing software. Hackers write their own. IT know how to "cobble together" things. Hackers understand things. Without the intimate understanding that comes from NIH, there is no room for the hack. Being a better programmer is a long term motivation, and it's often the methods that pay off in the long term that contribute most towards this goal. |