GoKawiilHi friends,
I’ll be attending Babashka Conf on May 8 and Dutch Clojure Days on May 9. If you’re attending either (or just visiting Amsterdam), drop me a line!
When I have an idea for a project, it tends to go in one of these two directions:
I just do it. Maybe I make a few minor revisions, but often it turns out exactly how I’d imagined and I’m happy. I think, “I should look for prior art”. There’s a lot of prior art, dealing with a much broader scope than I’d originally imagined. I start to wonder if I should incorporate that scope. Or perhaps try to build my thing on top of the existing sorta-nearby-solutions. Or maybe I should just use the popular thing. Although I could do a better job than that thing, if I put a bunch of time into it. But actually, I don’t want to maintain a big popular project, nor do I want to put that much time into this project. Uh oh, now I’ve spent a bunch of time, having neither addressed the original issue nor experienced the joy of creating something.
I prefer the first outcome, and I think the pivotal factor is how well I’ve internalized my own success criteria.
For example, last weekend I hosted my friend Marcin and we decided it’d be fun to do some woodworking, so we threw together this shelf and 3d-printed hangers for my kitchen:
Absolute banger of a project:
brainstormed the design over coffee
did a few 3d-print iterations for the Ikea bin hangers (OnShape CAD, if you want to print your own)
used material leftover from my workbench
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