Motivation (by alaric)

6 Comments

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  By @ndy, Mon 10th Oct 2011 @ 10:57 am

  Leverage is the key. If you take two equal people and one reads just a little more than the other then that person will, very soon, be far far more advanced than the other. As PG said, it's like compound interest.

  You're quite far up that curve mentally, but you've not invested the same in tooling. Tooling is the same lever, but in the real world. I guess you find yourself frustrated because there's an impedance mismatch between the design you have in your head and the tools you have at your disposal to instantly realise it.

  Build more levers and soon you'll have the leverage you'll need.

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  By Richard, Tue 11th Oct 2011 @ 5:35 pm

  I understand the problem.

  But I think there is a third answer to your final question. If you're going to make anything at all, it has to be something that you want, that you can design, and that you can execute. It has to fit in your time constraints.

  But that doesn't mean that it has to be trivial. It has to be novel or entertaining, and it has to be economical of effort. That's not exactly the same. It can be very clever, or very odd, or just randomly entertaining to your own self and nobody else. All of those are good reasons.

  I also think that it is destructive of motivation to decline to make something just because someone else could make a better one. Or even because someone else has made a better one. Otherwise you aren't allowed to pick up a spanner unless you are planning to make The Best X In The World. That is very rarely the right thing to plan to make first.

  Personally, I incline to make the Worst X That Might Possibly Work first. Sometimes it's the path to imagining and making some much better and different thing, sometimes it turns out that the worst one is actually just fine and I never need to make a better one.

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  By sarah, Wed 12th Oct 2011 @ 8:15 am

  I don't think it would cost that much to actually implement either Al we just need to be creative - I miss disgussing how we are going to move projects forward.

  But now I know why you gave me that look when I said once I've made something perfect once I struggle with the motivation to make them whole sale - like the wiggly pets etc...

  Big hugs and I'm sorry you don't get more time to do you things - as for what you should do when you have that time - design away - it is you time what comes out of it doesn't have to be practical.

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  By alaric, Wed 12th Oct 2011 @ 11:47 am

  @Richard: I think part of my problem is scoping a problem that I can solve quickly enough (given limited time) to not get bored of - so I can get results quickly 😉

  Right now, the big one I want to do next time I get a day free is to finish off Ugarit for its v1 release. This mainly boils down to finishing off a unit test (and hopefully finding no bugs with it!), then a relatively simple change to make it not depend on gdbm, but instead to use sqlite, for less GPL contamination and better consistency if it fails during an operation. I reckon I can do the lot in a day, then I can tag at as v1.0 and get it out there...

  ...including using it to drive my own backups in future 😉

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  By Richard, Wed 12th Oct 2011 @ 4:37 pm

  🙂 Your confidence is commendable.

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  By alaric, Fri 21st Oct 2011 @ 11:05 am

  I have since found that reading the contents of http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/categories/sci-tech/computing/ is rather motivating in itself. I've thought about lots of cool things! And because they're written down, they won't be forgotten, and even if I never do, somebody else might be inspired to implement them, or to improve their own ideas that are eventually implemented... We can but hope.

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