>Nobody knows what they’re doing; ignorance fuels creativity; complex systems are built iteratively. Those are the ideas I want you to remember.
Really liked this piece and wanted to add something to it that I hope resonates with HN. I have myself run across all of this, particularly the complexity part, and have heard anecdotal evidence from others that I know, that when one finishes a function or a library of moderate complexity, and you step back from it for a while, and you come back to it, it looks really impressive. It's now no longer something that can be grokked at a glance. It looks complicated, with all kinds of persnickety details. You remember the "why" of certain unintuitive parts - evidence of problems you ran into and had to solve. The code is the product of many hours of iteration - and the code expanded, contracted, and settled into the shape it's currently in - a shape which, if presented to your earlier self, you would say "I created that? Gosh, it looks like something a professional programmer might have made." (or it might look like a horrendous hacky mess, of course.)
I have done projects that seemed small, and then by the end they were enormous, but I knew them intimately.
But when I start a project with the idea of it being that big in my head from the start, I'll get stressed and psych myself out, sometimes from doing it at all.
There's something to be said for ignoring the forest for planting the tree, to turn a proverb on it's head.
Really liked this piece and wanted to add something to it that I hope resonates with HN. I have myself run across all of this, particularly the complexity part, and have heard anecdotal evidence from others that I know, that when one finishes a function or a library of moderate complexity, and you step back from it for a while, and you come back to it, it looks really impressive. It's now no longer something that can be grokked at a glance. It looks complicated, with all kinds of persnickety details. You remember the "why" of certain unintuitive parts - evidence of problems you ran into and had to solve. The code is the product of many hours of iteration - and the code expanded, contracted, and settled into the shape it's currently in - a shape which, if presented to your earlier self, you would say "I created that? Gosh, it looks like something a professional programmer might have made." (or it might look like a horrendous hacky mess, of course.)