The Importance of a Defined Plan

07/02/15

I lie to myself a lot. I mean, not on purpose, or not consciously. But my brain takes a lot of shortcuts in thought that are simply invisibile until I attempt a proper communication of those thoughts. Once I try to detail my thoughts, in words or pictures or gestures, I find that those thoughts aren't nearly as complete or indeed coherent as they seemed in my brain.

And so, I realize every time a new thought occurs to me for a project or for an idea, I have to at the very least write it down until it is as detailed as I feel it is in my brain before I do anything else with the idea.

Case in point: my Japanese Study Tool (actually running here, though signup is temporarily disabled). Now that I have a thing that sort of works, I started having ideas and where to go from there:

• Importing flashcards from other users
• kanji stroke order illustration
  • Maybe with animation
• Converting the view .ejs files to ReactJS files

And there's other stuff in my head I'm having trouble calling forth. In any case, I got carried away thinking about that first item that I put off actually putting the japanese tool on my server. It's there now, and the one person who wasn't me that wanted to play with it has an account.

I'm sure that anyone else who wants an account for any reason can contact me somehow and I'll set them up with one right away.

And once again I have uncovered the value of actually implementing something incomplete instead of working towards addressing all the edge cases and "wanted" features right away. In this case, it was simply running the tool's repository at ksionda.me/japanese. Having it run in a place that is not the root of the actual domain has led to the obvious problem that the '/' link leads to ksionda.me instead of the home page of the japanese app. I think this problem is actually quite solvable, programmatically. The ejs files (and later, ReactJS files) are quite capable of more dynamically generating "root" links and redirects where the root is either "/" or "/whatever/".

In any case, working towards feedback instead of trying to think ahead is a habit I'm still having trouble forming. I'll get there, though. And I think just saying my thoughts and plans out loud will help reveal the better iterative path more easily.