When you are constructing a prototype, sometimes you first need to put it together with string and chewing gum, just so you can quickly get a sense of things. The result doesn’t need to be robust or even completely functional — it just needs to tell you whether you are going in the right general direction.<\/p>\n
But then at some point, after you’ve figured out what direction you are heading, you need to replace the string and chewing gum with bricks and mortar — in my case, solid techniques of software construction that will be sturdy and reliable and built to last.<\/p>\n
I often find the transition from the former to the latter a bit stressful. Here I’ve just had a nice little lean-to that worked, albeit badly, and now I am going to tear it all down and replace it with a real building. That is going to take a while, and during the transition I won’t really have anything to show for my efforts. But of course it’s worth it.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I noticed something: I wouldn’t let myself start construction on the more robust version of my prototype until I got the shoddy temporary version basically working. I found this puzzling. Here was something I knew I was going to toss out, something that I knew wasn’t even worth very much, but I simply had to finish it before I would let myself start on the next phase of the project.<\/p>\n
At first I was perplexed, but eventually I realized that the benefits of this strategy were very real, although entirely psychological. Knowing that I had finished<\/i> something, even something not made to last, would give me the confidence I needed to tackle the much more challenging problem ahead.<\/p>\n
Robert M. Persig put it very well: “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you are constructing a prototype, sometimes you first need to put it together with string and chewing gum, just so you can quickly get a sense of things. The result doesn’t need to be robust or even completely functional — it just needs to tell you whether you are going in the right general … Continue reading “Peace of mind”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11144"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11164,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions\/11164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}