Just Get It Done

Heavily inspired by my latest experiences when working on a relatively tough problem for me, I decided to write a short post about it. I hope it will help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.

When you start working on a new problem, project, or task - you will be ignorant, uncertain, and inexperienced with some of the technologies, tools, or concepts. That’s fine, and that’s how it should be.

Embrace it. Try to mess around with the problem, read about useful tools, techniques, data structures, and all the other things that might help you solve the problem. Pretend that you absolutely know what you’re doing.

So, I get into the coding, and the first thing I do is name the project with the -draft suffix. It tells my brain that this is not the final version. It’s just a draft. It’s not perfect and probably never will be.

I start to write some code while trying to keep it as simple as possible; I focus on the core functionality and start making mistakes.

What type of mistakes did I make? Well, some could be fixed inside the code of the current draft, while others made the whole project unreadable, hard to maintain, inefficient, slow—you name it.

When I hit a wall, I usually tell myself, “Well, that’s just a draft version. I’ve just proven that the approach I took is wrong. I’ll start over and do it better.”

At some point, you just need to stop dancing around the problem, trying to tweak it, or change the approach slightly. Screw it, just figure out something better.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!