Me and a fellow recurser are coding the speed reading app in Elm, I am getting a lot out of it. It's amazing how types add certainty to your app and terseness. I am not used at all to using a typed language, so for example not having to see if the app actually works by alt tabbing t it is a great relief.
I've wrote a basic app that served as a POC, in Electron, now it's just a matter of writing one in Elm and then putting the compiled code in Electron.
Hopefully other people will find it useful and use it.
This week I'm going to bring Hammock Driven Development to our weekly meeting of interesting things.
It's my second time watching the video, this time I'm taking notes.
When was the last time you though about something for an hour? What about a whole day? And over the course of a month? Or a year? What do you think it takes to become confident doing somthing you never did before?
Analysis and design is about
- identifying some problem that we're trying to solve
- assessing our solution in terms of whether or not it solves that problem
We should be solving problems, not writing features.
To solve problems recognise the problem, talk about it, practice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It, is a book that helps you tackle problems in a structured way.
How to approach
- talk about it or write it down
- understand it (facts, context, contraints, what don't you know?, are there related problems?)
- not everything is awesome, look for tradeoffs and problems in your solution
- look for helps in wihtepapers, online
On the hammock nobody knows you're not sleeping. Nobody will bother you. Focus. Not in front of a computer. Let your loved ones know that you are going to be "gone".
- analysis
- tactics
Use your waking mind to assign tasks to your background mind and to analyse its products.
- good at making connections
- abstractions
During sleep
- our brain proccesses the information we learned during the day
- make memory stronger and weed out irrelevant details
- our brain finds hidden relations and solves problems
You feed a problem into the background mind by thinking about it hard enough during the day.
Writing down problems helps associate them with images, especially if you draw pictures.
Hammock time is important mind's eye time, go somewhere quiet and focus, don't sleep.
Now you just wait. At least overnight. Work on more than one thing, not interleaving over one day, but over the course of time. Don't stay stuck, get more input, talk about it.
When you figure out something take that and switch to it.
Being wrong is ok. You will think about better ideas. That's ok.