Try and aim for things that you can build in a couple of evenings or an afternoon. It’s more important to get things out, than working on things that seem bigger.
Once you’ve hacked a few things together:
- You’ll get ideas for bigger things
- You’ll have the mini-project code that you can put into the next thing.
This lets you get closure from a project and move on to the next things. For me - this used to be my blog, but now it’s more from standing up and talking about stuff.
It’s best if this place is public, and that there is a definite way of considering it “done” (tweeting out a link).
Stuff that hangs around is rubbish because:
- You don’t feel like you’re completing anything or moving forward
- You end up working on lots of things at the same time
It’s tempting to go back to update/fix things. If you’re after building more creative/fun things, you need to be moving forward ideas rather than getting dragged into past ones.
This is partly related to thinking small - it’s better to have something small and basic that doesn’t depend on apis, build-tools or servers. Ideally, it won’t need tended too, and if it does you can just scrap it.
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Links:
- http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock - lots of small, isolated hacks
- http://www.onegameamonth.com - great way to force you to be creative and have output
- http://jsoxford.com - you should give a talk