Ask YC: How you developed your first projects?

source : Independant Scholar by Ronald Gross<p>The important thing about your first project is not that it is your first, but that it is "yours". Because it is your first piece of original research, you do not have to worry about whether or not it succeeds. One of the project's purpose is for you to begin to explore what success means to you in this kind of activity. It is real experiment that, while it should be enjoyable in itself' is designed for what you can learn from the way it goes.<p>The course of your project may be irregular, unpredicatble,serendipitious, but that is no problem whatever as you are not following a prescribed course of study. Unlike someone taking a course and following a road that has been laid out in advance, you are adventuring. Sometimes there is no way to plot out beforehand how you will proceed as your problem or subject unfolds before you.<p>my question now: I would like to know typical approaches by good programmers while attacking a problem for which there is very little information at hand or maybe you have this super idea and then you build whole pciture in mind. How you did something like this?<p>I myself did this while working on json 2 years back. I liked it so much that we changed whole api,implemented test automation, clientside tools for QA team and sort of polished the product on which I was working then. This was not difficult on technical level though but it was rather change in the way we relooked at everything and made it work as we thought (2-3 people)<p>What are your stories from simple ideas/problems to solution