Start In The Middle

My hard-drive is littered with projects where I did tackle the cool bits first. It's how I work. Most of them aren't finished though because I lose interest when I hit the boring bits.<p>The only way I get through boring code it would seem, is by getting paid to slog through it.<p>This will likely lead to premature aging and an early grave for me...

Ironically, I started reading this article in the middle, got to the end and then read the top half.

often the sum of all the boring bits is what distinguishes your product.

Can't say that I've abandoned that many projects due to distraction of starting from scratch... I just haven't started that many, but I mostly agree with this line of thinking. I think programmers (myself included) tend to get distracted by optimizations and minutia which actually have no bearing on project/product success. That makes the boring, routine part much longer than it needs to be.

This is exactly why I switch hobbies every few months. You spend so much time learning to do the thing before you actually try it. Like kayaking, or rock climbing, then you figure out that once you know what you are doing it just becomes repetitive. I wish there was a to just jump past the learning curve to experience things before you learn how to do them.

I love how everything has a fancy name now. We've been doing StartInTheMiddle / MinimumViableProduct / Prototyping / GetSomethingOut / StepwiseRefinement for years:<p>Customer: I must have anything I want from the database without asking you.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem, here's your screen.<p>Customer: This only does does Customers. I want to pick <i>any</i> table.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem, now you can pick your table.<p>Customer: This dumps every column. I want to pick my own.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem. Now you can pick your columns.<p>Customer: This doesn't sort. I want it to sort.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem. Now you can sort.<p>Customer: But I want multiple sorts, some ascending, some descending.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem. Sort any way you want.<p>Customer: It dumps the whole table. I want to filter.<p>Me, 1 hour later: No problem. Now you can filter.<p>Customer: It only give me local columns. I want columns from other tables, too.<p>Me, 5 mins later: Give me an example.<p>Customer: Here. Give me these linked columns and accumulators, too.<p>Me, 2 days later: OK. I figured out how to give you all this data too.<p>Customer: OK. This will work. Why didn't you do all this in the first place?<p>Stepwise Refinement Method: Time to beta: 1 hour. Time to production: 3 days.<p>Waterfall Method: Time to beta: not applicable. Time to production: who knows?

I absolutely concur, at least with respect to my own motivations and habits. Every successful project I've built started in the middle; whereas every abandoned project started with grandiose organizational plans.