Notes on craft

Some things I've started doing on purpose.

Ship the ugly version first. Polish is the easy part. The hard part is finding out whether the thing was worth making at all. The faster you find out, the cheaper the answer.

Write the README before the code. If I can't explain the thing in one paragraph, it isn't ready. Sometimes I find out it never was.

Limit the scope, not the ambition. The fix for a project that got too big is rarely a smaller dream. It's a smaller first slice of the same dream.

Read your own work tomorrow. I almost never publish on the day I finish writing. Tomorrow me is a much better editor than the guy who just hit save.

Keep a "next time" file. Every time something bites me, a config gotcha, a wrong abstraction, a habit I want to break, it goes in the file. I read it before I start anything new. The list keeps getting longer. The same mistakes keep getting rarer.

None of this is original. All of it is practised.