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Ask HN: Doing things which don't scale and it's taking forever

8 points by tarunkotia ↗ HN
Maybe, I think this is an occupational hazard being an engineer that I can code my way out of the schlep work. I feel like I am trying to boil the ocean and it has been overwhelming with the amount of data I need to sift through. I decided to focus on single category (MVP) and build a report but even to do that it is taking me forever.

How do other people cope with this kind of syndrome?

10 comments

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Jtsummers
Without more information, it sounds like you may be having some issues with anxiety (perhaps just me projecting). Perhaps not in the clinical sense, but hear me out. When people become anxious, they start to have difficulty breaking complex/large tasks into simple/small tasks. Even when they try to, they're still taking on too much work (or it still feels like too much work) to be able to complete in a reasonable (again, in their perception) time. This happens to me often, and this year has definitely been worse than most.

Here's what I do: Take a step back, write down what needs to be done. Break those things down into achievable chunks. Repeat. Then focus on one part at a time, don't scattershot it. Don't take a small bit of work from here and there. Take the small pieces that sum up to a completed larger piece, and get it done. Repeat.

One of the benefits of this is an emotional one. You'll start to see small wins, which feels good. Then you get bigger wins.

By way of analogy, trying to get fit is similar. I wanted to run a 5k, I just couldn't (I was 40 pounds overweight and had barely exercised in years). I went out and walked it, that worked but took me way too long (50 minutes the first time). I increased my walking pace, I started jogging short segments, eventually I could do a full 5k run. If I had just gone out initially and tried to run it, I'd have failed. And gone out two days later, and failed. Eventually I'd have given up (I know, I did that before). By making small achievable goals that also built up towards my ultimate goal, I gave myself both the emotional framework to maintain motivation and the structural framework to actually achieve it.

tarunkotia
I think you are absolutely right when it comes to anxiety. I think it paralyzes me on certain days but then I have a framework similar to what you are alluding to in dealing with it.

In a weird way, it's a good feeling to know that other people go through similar ups-and-downs. Thank you for your comment.

Jtsummers
It's not weird. One thing that happens with anxiety is that, in many cultures, you start to feel a bit of shame about it. Like, "This is easy, everyone else is doing fine, what's wrong with me?!?" kind of shame. You internalize it and it builds and feeds into the same cycle and promotes the anxiety.

Learning that you're not alone helps to break that cycle (even just for a moment) and brings things into better perspective. One of the key things I had to develop years ago was the skill to restore perspective to my thoughts (that task-breakdown thing is just one thing). When I find myself becoming angry, I have to ask myself, "Is this an appropriate response?" Some drunk just took off the front half of your car? Anger may not be helpful, but it's appropriate. There's no more milk in the fridge? The anger is not warranted, take a breath, realize that you're stressed, and put "milk" on the grocery list.

And substitute all negative emotions into the above. At my worst, I'd get emotionally sad over incredibly tiny things like spilling a bit of salt (not even the whole shaker). Examine that emotion when it rises, don't try to stop it but examine it. Ask if it's appropriate, ask if there's another cause or other factors involved.

It's not necessarily easy, it depends on how stressed you are at the moment. But if you try to make that a habit of thought, over time it becomes easier and almost automatic.

Additionally, please consider seeking out a therapist. Having someone to speak to confidentially and who can help develop these kinds of skills is incredibly helpful.

tarunkotia
Wow, this is pretty much what I've been going through for some time now. I am usually not very emotional being but off late I am on the edge.

Thanks again for being so open and sharing your experience.

Jugurtha
As I say: doing things that don't scale is like children wetting the bed when they're asleep. It feels great and warm, but the desired course is to wake up, clean up, and grow.

Jesting aside, can you share more about your project and give more context?

>I feel like I am trying to boil the ocean and it has been overwhelming with the amount of data I need to sift through.

Which data are you sifting through to do what?

>Quantitative framework for app research and discovery for your business

This seems interesting, but what does this mean? Could you explain this to someone like me?

Does it mean that, as a business looking for an app, I type in some search terms and you'll return a comparative report with treemaps for features or something similar to what the Observatory of Economic Complexity does[0]?

- [0]: https://oec.world/

tarunkotia
The primary purpose of the tool to is to surface what a software application is good at by bench-marking the features & functionality across the whole category(s) that the app in question belongs to.

Most of my time goes into normalizing feature set across a category of software so that you can do apples-to-apples comparison. Then I am quantifying how well that feature is implemented within the product, hopefully extrapolate that to the whole category, essentially a ranking system for the features. To do that, I need to collect and normalize those feature sets.

W.r.t. treemap, I am trying different visualization techniques and seems like treemap is pretty good in answering these questions quickly:

1. Which product is a dominant product in a particular category?

2. Which feature dominates a product/category?

After doing a few user interviews people honestly don't care about the ranking or a better framework to search for software. They mostly care about how can software evaluation and procurement can be less painful.

Thanks for the comment and sharing the link of eoc. That's pretty much what I am trying to do for apps.

I hope to extend this to libraries/packages which can be very helpful in knowing what are the strengths of a particular library or package in a snapshot.

Jugurtha
>The primary purpose of the tool to is to surface what a software application is good at by bench-marking the features & functionality across the whole category(s) that the app in question belongs to.

> 1. Which product is a dominant product in a particular category?

> 2. Which feature dominates a product/category?

Like Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves?

Is there an early version we could look at and play with?

[dead] 02020202
i know exactly what you mean. the best thing i can recommend is quit the current project. it is too late to adjust.

next time, keep in mind one keyword - yagni. do not think what you might need in the future or how this pretty interface represents this data and things like that. program for what you need right now. let the code be dirty, ugly, disgusting, just make it work. you will want to be clever and whatnot, don't. right now is what matters, don't think about future and possible technical debt or need of rewrites because this code is horrible. right now is what matters. and if the output is what is expected form the input, then what is inside does not matter.