Jim Lynch Codes
  • Blog
  • About Jim

Writings about one coder's stories & experiences.

Seeing With Fresh Eyes

12/24/2016

0 Comments

 
It's Christmas Eve, and I just got back to my empty apartment after hanging out with my family all day. On the drive there I was listening to an interview with the dj/producer Nightmare. I think there are definite parrallels between creating music and creating software so it's interesting to take what he said and inteprete it in terms of programming. Here's what he said.

Come Back And See It With Fresh Eyes

He said that he was working on 15 to 20 tracks at the time, and even though it was somewhat overwhelming he thought it was good because he would come back to the project with "fresh ears and fresh eyes". I can see the parallels here to me working on software projects. When I work on multip[le projects and move from one to the other there are different things I notice coming back to it that you don't really see when working on it day in and day out.

One Or Two Core Projects, and Lots of Spikes

Aside from work, I like to have only one or two core projects that I'm working on. These are meant to be long-term projects with hopes to someday may it to production and be user-facing. However, like Nightmare says it can sometimes get stale always working on that project. Perhaps you are afraid of breaking things and so you don't have the freedom to really experiment how you would like to. This leads into the idea of a "spike solution", a separate project meant to solve a problem or prove something is possible before it's implemented into the core application. You could also take a more fun interpretation of spikes to just mean any project that isn't your 1 or 2 core projects. A spike could be a totally new project or framework, a game, a hackethon project, a hackerrank answer, etc. The point is that you just want to get away from your main project for a while and do some other programming.

Fresh Eyes Without Leaving

Leaving and coming back to your project can give you fresh eyes, but I if you are especially aware of it then you can also in a way give yourself fresh eyes. Think about who your users are (and keep documented notes about people you talk to in real life, who they are, what they like etc). Think about how they would feel about it; about the interface, the colors, the buttons. Think about first impressions and whether they would know what to click. There are many ways to look with fresh eyes, but I think many will agree that fresh eyes are better than stale eyes. ;)

Happy Holidays,
​Jim
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    ​Author

    Picture
    The posts on this site are written and maintained by Jim Lynch. About Jim...
    Picture
    Follow @JimLynchCodes
    Follow @JimLynchCodes

    Categories

    All
    Actionscript 3
    Angular
    AngularJS
    Automated Testing
    AWS Lambda
    Behavior Driven Development
    Blockchain
    Blogging
    Business Building
    C#
    C / C++
    ClojureScript / Clojure
    Coding
    Community Service
    CS Philosophy
    Css / Scss
    Dev Ops
    Firebase
    Fitness
    Flash
    Front End
    Functional Programming
    Git
    Go Lang
    Haskell
    Illustrations
    Investing
    Java
    Javascript
    Lean
    Life
    Linux
    Logic Pro
    Music
    Node.js
    Planning
    Productivity
    Professionalism
    Python
    React
    Redux / Ngrx
    Refactoring
    Reusable Components
    Rust
    Security
    Serverless
    Shell Scripting
    Swift
    Test Driven Development
    Things
    TypeScript
    Useful Sites
    Useful Tools
    Video
    Website Development
    WebStorm
    Writing

    Archives

    March 2023
    August 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015

    RSS Feed

  • Blog
  • About Jim
JimLynchCodes © 2023