Cache/archive/mirror: <a href="https://archive.is/jrQ4n#selection-727.0-731.211" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/jrQ4n#selection-727.0-731.211</a><p>In short:<p>> What is the Second Sock Syndrome?<p>> SSS usually refers to the inability to produce complete pairs of socks. Knitting the first sock usually goes quickly. But the second one seems to drag on, never gets completed or even cast on in the first place.<p>It's entirely a knitting blog, but surely this was posted here as it's a problem I know I face in all sorts of domains, including programming. Once the interesting part is figured out, finishing the project is the tough part.
The take-away for developers is perhaps this: There are a lot of ways to deal with the boring part of a job where there's not much new or creative stuff happening. Some are better than others.<p>I'd break the suggested strategies into a few general categories. You can be so intrinsically motivated that you never really encounter this problem in the first place (1). You can play psychological games to try and make it harder to lose interest (2, 3, 4, 8, 9). You can alter the workload in a way that makes it more interesting, but may cause quality to suffer (5, some 7, 10, 11, 12). You can rearrange the work in a way that actually creates <i>more</i> work, but also helps it stay interesting for longer (6, some 7, 10, 11, 12).<p>I find that those last two categories tend to go hand-in-hand in programming, too. So finding ways to help yourself just muscle through the boring part really is preferable in a professional setting.<p>OTOH, for fun projects, both sock knitting (and mittens) and development, I tend to go for those latter strategies. The corollary here is that I try not to knit socks for others, and you probably shouldn't take a dependency on anything I'm not getting paid to write.
In SW development we try to avoid this by building a framework where the second instantiation comes at almost no extra cost. However, we have the problem where we start building the framework and then never solving the original problem...
While this is definitely a problem developers face, many of the solutions in this article only apply to socks. HN, do you have any tips for completing personal projects when they stop being fun?
The thing about knitting is that you can't avoid knitting that second sock. In technology, we can just build a machine that copies the first sock.<p>The problem we face is that it usually takes an order of magnitude more time to build that machine than to actually knit the second sock...
I don't know specifically about socks, but with other things, I get through the repetitiveness by optimizing the process, and then each successive output gets quicker or easier. You never do it the best way the first time, and then the game becomes how can I do this with less steps or less effort, what are the tricks? Eventually you get up against the wall and there aren't anymore gains to be made, but at that point it's usually become mindless muscle-memory, and it isn't really much of a chore; it's actually usually quite enjoyable.
I've found that often "lacking motivation" is a misinterpretation of "lacking understanding of a fundamental idea." Do you really lack motivation to implement clock recovery in your toy software modem? Or do you not know how digital PLLs work.<p>IMO knitting is closer to CRUD dev: it's a little challenging but it's mostly just reading/following patterns and counting (although this is coming from someone who crochets and doesn't knit.)
One related "problem" I've encountered is when the 2nd iteration of something turns out better than the 1st (and the 3rd, 4th, 5th get subsequently better). Perhaps not as big of a problem when you're making stone tiles, or some other output, but it sure does suck to have one good sock and one "eh" sock.
The second sock syndrome is perhaps never an issue if you have a real environment of collaboration, comadrerie or even apprenticeship. Just more yarn and code by yourself is not going to cut it for long unless you have an external motivator.<p>The chemicals which activate our sense of happiness more than anything is the feeling when we see our friends and family have breakthroughs and achieving a goal. It’s probably a bigger factor for the one that is trying to reach that goal.<p>This is perhaps why twitch is so popular, even in an activity such as gaming which has been made to be fun by itself alone, socialization is a force multiplier.<p>I can have a sense of this at different work places, people are so focused on result and not on the process that people stop caring of craftmanship and disciplin. In the long term it makes the company rot from the inside with high turn over and lost knowledge and increase of technical debt and finally a losing business.
I love how an article about knitting gets related so quickly to other domains (by reading the comments). I had to search on that blog to understand that it wasn't related to a technical domain.<p>However, from the title I thought it was about the law (if it's not a law, it should be) that says that if a pair of sockets in a drawer are put together you can easily find the pair. Instead if you find one of the socks of the pair, the other sock of the pair, while still in the drawer, is mysteriously teleported into another dimension, never to be found again.