Momentum and consistency: the key to finishing projects
- 1 minI have years upon years of story ideas in various different places and in the same way I have years (but still a decent amount) of ideas for coding projects. Web applications, mobile applications, Javascript games, website designs, and to a smaller extent hardware projects.
One of these ideas made use of browsing history. A grand project. Recently, I scoped the idea into a smaller “stepping stone” project that involves Wikipedia browser history. And because I had didn’t have much of an idea how to approach that project, I broke it down again.
Somehow that breaking down translated to a Chrome extension I started working on half a year ago.
The practice extension removed the average rating and individual ratings from book reviews on Goodreads. Days of whether or not I wanted to read a book being influenced by the book’s average rating and individual ratings would be no more. I would return to the days of judging a book for myself based on its cover and description.
This project is extremely small, something I should have spent an entire day to complete it as opposed to spending thirty minutes on it, putting down, and then several months later trying to pick up again. Which of course involves time spent relearning how browser extensions are structured, how to test my code, and how I wrote mine (which involves criticizing it and improving it). Time I wouldn’t have had to spend on this small project if I’d just spent an hour or two more several months ago finishing it.
This is a reminder for myself that I’m happiest coding when I break projects down into smaller, set (yet flexible) steps that I commit to working on consistently every day. I’m happiest building momentum through consistent patterns.
Samantha Louise Causey
Junior Rails dev @ Annkissam. BA in Computer Science from Smith College, 2017.