Tag Archives: learn

Toning Down The Needs

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The Need to Track

I can’t really explain the need to track things. For some reason, I’d like to come back to the time when I didn’t know anything about web development and watch the whole process of me becoming better. I guess I want to sell books on it or something.

These past couple of days, I’ve turned it down as much as I can. I just went and did it. I went and starting futzing around with the server, trying to become better at being a sysadmin.

I just did stuff. And the scary thing is, I don’t remember exactly, command by command, thought by thought, what I did. In the end, I got a working server out of it, with a blog that’s running much faster than before.

Looking back, I’m realizing that I really should have kept just a little bit more track of things, but really, the more important thing, and by far the more important thing, is that I got something done.

The Need to Learn

Not only is depth of knowledge important, so is the breadth. It’s kinda like going through Wikipedia, jumping from one article to another. I think it’s almost tied down to the desire to track, because after all, I strive to learn from mistakes.

While I was going at it with my sysadmin-ness, there were many places where I could have gotten off track and spent time doing something else. Even… “learning” to blog more consistently. But nope, I kept it quiet.

It’s the need to stay free flowing, in other words. But I need to learn to focus at times when I need to. And that time is now.

The Need to Perfect

The problem here is that I tend to sand away at knicks and corners until I don’t even have a product anymore. Well, I guess at that point I have to adapt and sell the remains.

But seriously, this entire HanMeta business took me so long because I wanted to have it all “correct” the first time. The funny thing is, I still don’t know what “correct” is. It was stupid of me to try and create this perfect company without actually building a company.

This goes back to failures in StatusFix also. The need to have that perfect process to make sure that all of my friends were developing code in perfect harmony… useless.

The fact is to produce something awesome, not perfect.

So Now What?

This doing business is much more fun than I could have imagined. It’s also ridiculously difficult and annoying.

I have much more to do. Just keep watching.

How Apt: An entry from Coding Horror

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Coding Horror: How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming

Sidenote: Derek, this is one of the many RSS feeds I read.

If you don’t have a subscription (RSS) to Jeff Atwood‘s blog, get one. I love what he has to say. His reading list is superb… too bad I’ve never fully read any of those books. I can say I’ve at least touched half of the books on the list.

One thing I have to add to what he wrote:

You won’t– you cannot– become a better programmer through sheer force of programming alone. You can only complement and enhance your existing programming skills by branching out. Learn about your users. Learn about the industry. Learn about your business. The more things you are interested in, the better your work will be.

My efforts of trying to learn this programming language or that web framework is worthless, unless I realize why I’m doing it. This is why my focus is going to change back again to just creating.

I’ve been obsessing over preparation: Preparing through learning, through researching. I guess I could have also been preparing through doing, but that wasn’t the case. If I had actually been preparing through doing, I would have quickly gone past the preparation stage into the action stage.

In the end, what I’m trying to say is that while I have all these great ideas of creating a web application, I won’t get anywhere just by sitting back and passively learning. I gotta learn to walk the talk.

I’ve told some people that programming is slowly becoming a chore: I think this should be the case with a lot of programmers in general. I know what I want the computer to do. I know the quantifiable steps required to make this Turing complete contraption do what I want it to do. But all these syntax… bureaucracy… complexes…

Eh. I just gotta suck it up. And Dew it. I mean, do it.

Goodness, I miss caffeine.