Who would have thought those people who made those swooshy shoes could so succinctly frame such an important concept that I lose sight of over and over again?

Let’s see how familiar this seems to anyone else, maybe (likely) it’s just me.

Development Lifecycle

• Come up with an idea
• Tirelessly research technological approaches to implementing said idea
• Begin development
• Determine there’s a Better Way^TM
• Start over
• Eventually abandon project because I’m not making any progress
• Repeat

So this is likely the most frustrating approach anyone has ever taken to doing anything ever. Yet I fall for it over and over. It’s one part Premature Optimization, two parts wanting to play with cool stuff, and the rest of the parts vanilla stupidity. And it doesn’t work.

Let’s consider what you’re trying to create. In my case, it’s rarely breathing apparatuses for astronauts so there’s really no reason it has to be perfect immediately. Maybe I should just worry about having something at the end of the day, rather than theoretically having something flawless. I can always iterate on a flawed design. It is possible to fix something after creating it.

Seems obvious, but I’ve been fooled by less.

“Sure”, you may be thinking, “but how often does the prototype get shipped to production?”

All the time. And that sucks. But consider the alternative. How often does nothing happen because ideas get lost in a wasteland of hypotheticals? Infinitely more times. Which do you prefer?

I’m doing my best to follow this line of thinking and not stray from that path. My current projects exist only because I’m following this. They are nowhere near perfectly coded or designed. Maybe they will be eventually, maybe they won’t. At least they exist.