| > A few months ago, I stumbled upon this post where someone spent 9 years making a shed. No knocks on them, but it’s not even a particularly good-looking shed. This is the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/czg04y/shed_is_finally... Although it did take 9 years from start to finish, nothing was done for most of that time. It sat as a slab for a few years, then as a half-finished skeleton for a few more. In between, life happened. There seems to be two contradictory lessons here: 1. Actually work on your project or it will never be finished and it will haunt your dreams. Don't just review the plans - actually take action to close the gap to shipping. 2. If you keep working on your project without shipping, it will haunt your dreams and mutate from cake into shed and you will be sad. That mutation in (2) can happen through a mis-estimate of the resources required to finish a cake: > ... Shed projects seem to start out with an underestimate. You think it’s only going to take a few months, and then it drags into a year. But you acquired some new skills in the meantime, so then you think it’s really just a month more. But then it didn’t pan out the way you envisioned it, so you want to spend a few months redoing it. But there are also times when you're certain you're working on a cake, but it turns into a shed anyway. One way to find yourself there is if you under-specify the cake. One way to prevent this from happening is to practice Readme-driven development,[1] or some other approach that forces you to clearly state what's in scope and what is not, and who is the intended audience. [1] https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve... |