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thefounder • yesterday at 8:16 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

In reality you are always on a time budget that is correlated with the output of the software you develop.(I.e is it worth it your time?) I’ve found out that the most important thing is to get feedback early even from yourself using whatever software you develop. If you develop a small effort piece of software you can ship it before other stuff is starting to compete for your time. But if it takes a year or more before even you can make any use of it I guarantee you that the chances of shipping it diminishes significantly. Other stuff competes for your time(I.e family, other hobbies etc).

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bayindirh • yesterday at 9:51 PM

I think we tackle the same problem in different ways. For me, if something is not urgent, I do it in a best effort way, and the shipping time doesn't matter.

I generally judge whether I allocate time for something or not depending on the utility and general longevity of the tool. I hack high utility / short life tools, but give proper effort to long life tools I need. As a side-effect, a long life tool can start very crude and can develop over time to something more polished, making its development time pretty elastic and effort almost negligible on the long run.

For me shipping time is both very long (I tend to take notes and design a tool before writing it), yet almost instant: when I decide that the design is enough for V1, I just pull my template and fill in the blanks, getting a MVP for myself. Then I can add missing features one at a time, and polish the code step by step.

Currently I'm contemplating another tool which is simple in idea, but a bit messy in execution (low level / system programming is always like that), but when it's design is over, the only thing I'll do it is to implement it piece by piece, without no time crunch, because I know it'll be long-living tool.

I can time-share my other hobbies, but I have a few of them. I do this for fun. No need to torture myself. And, I can't realize my all ideas. Some doesn't make sense, some doesn't worth it, some will be eclipsed by other things.

That's life, that's fine.