Many (Palm OS) programmers work on big projects-for now, lets say that big means more than you can accomplish in a day’s worth. The bigger the project gets, the harder it becomes to stay motivated, as stuff simply becomes too big.
The reason for this is simple-in TV, magazines and real life, we are beeing trained to seek ‘instant gratification’…stuff gotta work out fast or we tend to give up(it’ll never work anyways).
A small project can be ‘hacked’ into a somehow working state-this can have desasterous consequences in terms of spaghetti code and bugs, but lets forget these issues for now. But ‘bigger’ applications and games are impossible to really prototype in a day-doing it usually ends up fatally(currently recovering such a code base, which is terrible).
Help is close at hand-every huge thing consists of many tiny little things. A house consists of a million tiny bricks; and a software project usually also consists of small ‘subtasks’.
By attacking one tiny subtask after the other, you never get into a state of fatalism because development takes so long-instead, you always have something new to test when you rebuild the code. The something will probably be small, but that makes it easier to grasp. And since each feature gets tested immediately, there will be no more debugging orgies…
Always keep the old austrian proverb in mind-many drops of water drill a hole into the stone…
What do you think?
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Thanks for the advice. I find that this is a huge problem for myself – aiming to run – and falling before I can even walk. I’ve planned to write Palm OS programs for soooo long but has always put off the plan because of the ‘grand’ program I want to write is simply impossible for me right now.
Maybe I should start with something simpler
Any tips for a newbie programmer for Palm then?
Hi …
True …
I ve many project on the road, but one, the big, eat all the time … and many time I failed to give up. But when new idea come to do a plugin structure it was benefict !! Mainly because i code in public transport and i ve one hour to add or modify somethings in the code before i forget it the next day when i take again the public transport … or i spent half an hour to understand where i do this and why …
If you are curious … i m the author of kLauncher … a today / launcher palm application … you could found it on my website if you want to test it. But it s still a beta.
Hi,
coding in the public transport..did that too, many times.
To be honest: I have no problem shutting down my work and commencing later, because I try to make a flowchart of difficult tasks first. This way, I look at the flowchart and immediately see where I am!
Best regards
Tam Hanna