Recently: I've been trying to start a few project where I always hit an early roadblock with an issue only being solved with purchasing and installing new hardware
When you say "proper development environment configured" - what were the most annoying things?
As far as "proper development environment" goes, I have a bad habit of wanting a perfectionist environment with everything cleanly structured before I start writing serious core. If course this always bores me to death and prevents me from actually getting anything done, as opposed to just immediately starting to hack away
My question is how do you keep going? Show friends/coworkers, post on sites, get users? I even went as far as setting up a landing page and figuring out auto signup/provisioning and payments, then lack the motivation to market or continue development. I probably need a co-instigator that's not so dev-only.
As an example, recently, I’ve been thinking of building a list of ski resorts near where I live, so that I may then compile it into a kind of weather, snow forecasting site.
The first step was ‘compile and create a list of resorts’. Which was easy to do, but doesn’t lend nicely to the second step, rather, what second step?
I had a huge urge to just code something, anything. I didn’t spend enough time thinking about how it might develop.
My solution to getting started or continue going is to build the next thing I'm motivated to do, no matter how small. If I'm not motivated to even do that, I just create a setup where I can later start on the next thing, no matter now small. Usually once the setup is done, it's so easy to start that I usually do it in the same session as the setup.
I hate hate hate hate hate working in JS. Just throwing up a MPA with a templating engine is not enough functionality for what I want to offer. No matter how many times I try to start using React, Angular, Vue, or just do it with vanilla and maybe jQuery, I just don't get it
In my ideal world I would have a front end engineer friend who wanted to work on all the same things I did and I could just serve up APIs all day.
E.g. I wanted to make a random world generator. Continents and terrain are often done. Culture generators have been done too. Plots are rarely done, and they're the easiest, but aren't particular interesting on their own. Plots needed interesting characters. Character generation is common, but rarely clicks. So what flaws in existing character generators are easiest to tackle?
This whole process took me about 3 months before I got it down to a dropdown and a button. Before that it was endless iteration and experiments that went in a direction that wasn't particularly interesting, or too difficult.
Anything worth doing has nobody else go down the same path. So you start to question whether it's the right path and worth dedicating energy to.
What I had in my mind were things like setting up tools, configuring your project, etc. Basically, things that keep you from real productivity programming.