Questions to ask when you think need to finish something
cassidoo.co
cassidoo.co
Typically, models excel at tasks that are that boring, so I end up applying creativity where it's warranted instead of getting distracted by reinventing a tool that isn't quite perfect or some other diversion.
But you have to be intentful to keep the interesting parts and the high level choices for yourself - why by default doesn't happen, and many don't.
"Can I spend some amount of money and be done?"
"Is this worth spending some amount of money to be done?"
I have had innumerable projects where they just languished and languished and languished ... until I got annoyed enough to spend some money and then they were done and gone.
Sure, some projects are a "hobby". My hobbies are continuous and I like doing them so spending money to finish them is not relevant.
However, quite often a task languishing is either because I don't really like the task or don't feel like putting in the effort to learn the required knowledge. For those tasks, spending money often works.
(For example, my latest task along these lines was "sharpen my kitchen knives". After farting with far too many whetstones, I finally spent the money to buy a fixed-angle sharpening system. I took it out of the box, set it up, and in two evenings my dozen kitchen knives were sharp and pleasant to use again. I then put the system back in the box and put it in my closet for the next time I need it. I spent way less on that fixed-angle system than I have on the whetstones I tried up to this point.)
I think I can refresh a lightly dull blade in 10min or so, and speaking as a non-pro.
The long-term benefits of a whetstone is that you can get much more feedback on what's happening, while most "systems" work for a bit and then it's hard to see what part is over-worked or not performing as well as it used to.
Just putting it out here because I think people might either not be using an angle guide or just be somewhat misguided, since using a whetstone is really not much slower.
This is the same assumption (and problem) that every YouTube knife sharpening video makes.
The people who need those videos, by definition, have knives that are absurdly out of whack for some reason--super dull, badly sharpened by someone who "knew better", chipped because used like a cleaver, etc.
Those kinds of knives require a very coarse (150 grit or below) stone and quite a bit of time and attention on the first pass to fix. You will not fix it easily. You will not fix it in 10 minutes. You will not fix it with a 300 grit stone. You will not get any feedback from angle bite or a burr for a very long time. etc.
Most of the feedback mechanisms you rely on when sharpening with a whetstone do not exist when your knife is sufficiently out of whack. Learning to sharpen on a whetstone with such a knife is extremely difficult.
Either bring it to a professional with professional power tools or buy a new one and start being kind to your knives.
Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.
I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.
It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.
However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.
Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.
Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.
I do make sure to explicitly "freeze" a project that I'm no longer maintaining, and indicate such, in the README. I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.
But the projects that I do want to finish, I make sure to do a "full-fat" job. If I consider it "done," then it gets the Full Monty. I also continue to maintain. If I can't do that, it gets archived; even if I had completed and shipped it.
Those are valid questions, but I don't usually get that exacting. The projects that I walk away from, are usually because they were just for learning, I got into a "death spiral," or that were eclipsed by something else.
The date plus hundreds of issues, of which the last dozen are unaddressed variations of “is this project still alive”. And then you check the creator’s account and they’ve been active on other things. Just archive the repo. Please. It’s fine if you don’t want to work on the project anymore, that’s 100% your decision and your right, and no one should be able to criticise you for it. But please just do the tiny courtesy of letting other people know so an alternative can crop up and flourish. Archiving a repo takes less than a minute and is reversible if you ever change your mind.
This is a mental trick I play on myself that I know that I am doing, but somehow its works anyway.
You reminded me of the early days at inscribe.ai where we just had an Asana board with red, orange, and yellow tags meaning high, mid, and low importance, and after completing an important one I'd treat myself to a few unimportant ones. I'm not sure I ever did anything in the middle!
So that's kind of my grounded understanding of "finished": that something is "finished" given the context it operates in. Meets some contractual specifications.
I give away the core components of an (mildly SIEM-like) observability platform on GitHub. I publish demo clients, but I don't publish the actual clients which I utilize in production. I will give them to you if you make friends, demonstrate that you can steer the core components, and demonstrate that you're capable of providing useful, cogent feedback.
This is a support issue. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to provide support theater. I'm not that interested in the clients, per se; I'm more interested in what they accomplish for me. Let me put it plainly: I'm interested in what they do for you if you pay me money to be interested, or I find your particular application of personal interest. I don't want to hear that the clients are crap because they don't solve your personal problem pretzel. I don't want to hear that the client doesn't work when the server components aren't set up properly.
I'm pretty comfortable with stuff being finished for a given context. That functionality in that context is a kind of oasis or petri dish, and if stuff manages to transplant to a different context or different inhabitants come to the oasis then I'm generally interested in looking at that and reexamining "finished"; and that's why I put it out there, in public.
I have a thing. I solved a riddle after much labor. Having solved it the fire is gone AND much new possibilities have opened. So that's the dilemma.
I'd love to read something longer about this.