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Right. That second paragraph of yours, i.e.:

>It often goes like this: Oh snap, we encountered a problem! Lets find a tool, framework, language that promises to solve a similar sounding problem. Now we have a problem with a layer of abstraction on top. Soon to be two problems. Lets find a tool, framework, language to solve both of them ...

is absolutely real, I've actually seen in happen both in projects I was in, and heard or read about.

This Rich Hickey video is somewhat relevant, IMO:

Tech Video: Rich Hickey: Hammock-Driven Development:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/03/tech-video-rich-hickey-ha...

You have to watch it at least part way through to get some of the better points in it, although the whole thing is good.



Yeah, my opinions on this are "slightly" influences by the Rich Hickey talks "simple made easy" and "hammock driven development":)

The difficulty I find is, identifying the moment to leave the hammock again in a startup enviroment. To what degree do you need to understand a problem before you take action. If you try to understand it 100%, you'll never get anything out there.

But I'm already very happy that I was able to convince the business side of the company of the approach in a brief talk about it and they now referrer to "the hammock" themselves :)


>The difficulty I find is, identifying the moment to leave the hammock again in a startup enviroment. To what degree do you need to understand a problem before you take action. If you try to understand it 100%, you'll never get anything out there.

Agreed. The problem, though, (and I'm painting with a broad brush here) is that the erring tends to be much more on the side of not trying to understand much or at all, of the problem, before jumping into action. I think a lot of it is due to peer pressure and wanting to be "seen" by peers and bosses (and VCs) to be doing stuff, as opposed to really getting things done better in the medium term, even if in the short term it looks like you are not acting but "only" thinking or analyzing or designing stuff. Hence my comment in that post I linked to, about "we have to ship next week". All too common - been there, seen a good amount of that. In fact, this subthread between HN user jacquesm and me just recently, is basically about the same point, although described in different words:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774234

>But I'm already very happy that I was able to convince the business side of the company of the approach in a brief talk about it and they now referrer to "the hammock" themselves :)

Cool :)




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