Why we need to stop designing and start delivering

Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Nimboo, Productivity, Programming, Ruby on Rails

Lately I’ve been very unproductive. Lost in business discussions and dreaming about the next big thing, I couldn’t finish two paid projects, and that sucks™.

The invisible shackles that didn’t allow me to finish those jobs have been holding me back so that I wasn’t able to do any real work even on personal projects.

I’ve tried finding the cause for this, blaming my lack of self discipline or the fact that I was not doing GTD as strictly as I was six months ago, but I knew there had to be something else, and the whole situation was getting on my nerves.

Last week I bought a game for the Nintendo Wii, Mario Strikers Charged, and while playing I remembered a pet project I started more than an year ago and never completed.

The project name was ICCFriends, a repository of Nintendo Friend Codes for the usenet it.comp.console community.

This time I had to finish it, so I went and looked through my code: awful. There was as much BDUF in there as in Windows Vista, and while wandering through the models and controllers, suddenly I got it!

I knew why I wasn’t delivering: I was designing things that were not useful. I lost so much time preparing for refactoring, or moving code around or laying the ground for future extractions or features that when the time came to implement the real thing I grew tired or got bored.

I then did the only thing I could possibly do to complete ICCFriends:

$ rm -rf ~/src/iccfriends
$ rails ~/src/iccfriends

I then focused on the simplest and shortest set of features I could imagine and in a couple of hours ICCFriends.net was up and running, and with more interesting features than those I was bduffing.

It looks rushed out because it is, but once again I was able to think and deliver and the rush of energies that came with it is a nice feeling I really missed.

Yesterday I learnt an important lesson, and from now on I will always strip my feature list before even start thinking about the implementation.

Permalink | Comments (3) | Jun 5, 2007

3 Responses to “Why we need to stop designing and start delivering”

  1. ilfantino Says:
    July 4th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    Sei un grande! Non ce sta nugazzo da fa!
    Avanti così!

    Big G! Respect!

  2. rigger Says:
    July 4th, 2007 at 4:00 pm

    I love you.

  3. Giovanni Intini Says:
    July 4th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    Guys I’m flattered, now go back to work!