Doing the thing is doing the thing

Posted by prakhar897 15 hours ago

Doing the thing is doing the thing(www.softwaredesign.ing)

103 points | 37 comments

poolnoodle 33 seconds ago|

Am I crazy or have I read this or a very similar post before?

TheAlchemist 1 hour ago||

"Doing it badly is doing the thing."

This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.

black_puppydog 17 minutes ago||

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly."

Got me through many a rough spot.

replooda 24 minutes ago|||

"When in doubt, use brute force."

gonzalohm 56 minutes ago||

Except you do this in a corporate setting and they will stop you the second it works. And then you are stuck maintaining a barely working version forever.

I learned this the bad way, but now I just lie and say it doesn't work until it's good enough for me

olliepro 26 minutes ago||

Everyone's threshold is different. I aspire to "move fast and break things", but more often than not, I obsess over the rough edges.

augusteo 1 hour ago||

I used to think this. Then I noticed how often "preparation" became its own infinite loop.

At work we built something from a 2-page spec in 4 months. The competing team spent 8 months on architecture docs before writing code. We shipped. They pivoted three times and eventually disbanded.

Planning has diminishing returns. The first 20% of planning catches 80% of the problems. Everything after that is usually anxiety dressed up as rigor.

The article's right about one thing: doing it badly still counts. Most of what I know came from shipping something embarrassing, then fixing it.

jstanley 1 hour ago||

I think you may have slightly misunderstood the article.

"Preparation" isn't mentioned explicitly, but by my reading it would come firmly under "is not doing the thing".

olliepro 22 minutes ago||

Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.

sghiassy 45 minutes ago|||

That’s not a zero-sum game.

Pivoting to zero-planning, would also have a basket of flaws.

dakiol 1 hour ago||

Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.

arscan 2 hours ago||

This is very similar to [1] (as discussed here [2]). It is a good message though, which is why I remember the earlier post at all.

1. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431

crazygringo 1 hour ago|

The discussion is going to be so similar, this really ought to be marked as a [dupe].

HPsquared 2 hours ago||

On the other hand.. planning, preparation and mise-en-place can help with doing the thing.

ninju 25 minutes ago|

But only if you end up doing the thing (and avoid analysis paralysis)

dakiol 1 hour ago||

I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.

munificent 42 minutes ago|

That's OK. It's totally fine to not doing the thing. Find joy however you want.

But it's not good to lie to yourself about doing the thing while not doing the thing. If your joy comes from the result of doing the thing, but you're putting time into other things that aren't doing the thing, that joy is not getting any closer.

MrGilbert 1 hour ago||

"Failing while doing the thing is doing the thing."

I needed this today. Currently questioning my career choices, as I hit my first wall where people are involved. Gave me quite the headache.

dondraper36 2 hours ago||

As a person with ADHD, I feel personally attacked.

zahlman 2 hours ago||

I guess you understand this and are making a joke, but that "attack" would appear to be intentional (and motivating).

I find that I don't have major issues doing a thing once I get started on it. The main problem is choosing from among many things that I could reasonably consider "the thing", and then feeling confident enough in that choice to start.

drivers99 1 hour ago|||

What about doing the thing intently for a week and then realizing later you haven't touched the project in 6 months?

dylan604 1 hour ago|||

This sounds not too dissimilar to the release the POC to prod mentality.

There are times where you obviously need to do the thing to understand the thing to see the process of doing the thing. This allows for breaking the process down into better steps. Just writing code to do things you think is doing thing but prove not to do the thing when actually doing the thing is common.

zahlman 26 minutes ago||

I'm talking about having completely different, unstarted, overall projects in mind.

llbbdd 2 hours ago|||

Same. I'm tempted to print this post out and hang it for inspiration. But I guess that would also not be doing the thing.

code_biologist 1 hour ago||

I have bad ADHD and printed the strangestloop.io blog post out and put it on the wall by my work desk in Oct 2023 according to the printout timestamp. I still haven't done the thing in some meaningful areas, and the print has honestly kind of been dispiriting. I'm going to take this post as the prompt to take it down.

llbbdd 1 hour ago|||

I'm going to consider this with the same weight I would if my future grey-bearded self popped out of a portal to say it, thank you. I've had a sticky note on my monitor for a few years that just says "SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP"; it might be time for that to go before it becomes much more depressing.

dijksterhuis 1 hour ago|||

sometimes i find that being okay with not doing the thing is exactly the thing i need to do to be okay with getting around to doing the thing

myst 37 minutes ago||

Coming up with excuses is not doing the thing.

OpenDrapery 34 minutes ago||

Is telling AI to do thing, doing the thing?

olliepro 30 minutes ago|

The more I use AI to do the thing, the more it feels like I didn't do the thing.

robofanatic 57 minutes ago|

Ironically people who fall in not doing the thing category of this article are valued more than those who do the thing.

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