Great advice for beginners
zenpencils.com
zenpencils.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA&playnext=1&#...
It's important because you get a different perspective on a "story" from the artist's side, and it gives you an idea of how to communicate: there are moments of "drawing the reader along" with a causal sequence, and "moments of reflection" where you pause and say "here's why you care about this."
If you think about writing a good tutorial, I think everybody understands that it should be incremental knowledge, that you should build upon whatever your students already know. But lots of tutorials are confusing precisely because they lack the other bits. Some tutorials look more like API documentation -- a bunch of disconnected things; no causal narrative goes between them. Other tutorials -- especially in functional programming! -- link together a whole lot of great ideas incrementally, and it's a killer story... and it's never really for anything.
Contrast this with SICP for example, that famous realization which many of us had where you're halfway through this Lisp course and suddenly, out of nowhere, the authors say, "okay, let's introduce the assignment statement." And you have this moment of reflection -- "wait, assignment statements aren't necessary?! ... huh! I guess they weren't! I did a lot of stuff without them already!".
Even if it's a tiny little moment where you mention, "okay, so here's an example of what you were writing before, here's why it's ugly, here's how this new technique does better" -- that sort of short intermezzo can be so amazingly helpful for learning programming that it startles me how often it's missing from tutorials. I think a good understanding of storytelling can help inform how we present information in general. (This especially holds when you draw a distinction between new ideas and news, as Alan Kay does in the SRII 2011 keynote: http://vimeo.com/22463791 .)
1) The story goes that Picasso was sitting in a Paris café when an admirer approached and asked if he would do a quick sketch on a paper napkin. Picasso politely agreed, swiftly executed the work, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a rather significant amount of money. The admirer was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you a minute to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years”
2) I was watching Golf the other day and saw how huge the purse was. I think Tiger Woods won over $1million dollars for 4 days worth of work. A lot of people would say that its not fair and that its way too much money. But think about it for a second. This guy started playing golf since he was a kid. Has been playing it every day, hours on end for 35+ more years. He lives, breaths, sleeps Golf. He his Mr. Golf. That $1mil payday is just the embodiment of years of "sacrifice" and enthusiasm for mastering a craft.
I wrote a bit, but the point is exactly what this comic is about. Its not about the money, but about working towards a goal. To find out what the goal is, you have to have "good taste" and know that what you're doing isn't satisfactory. I'm that way with a lot of things, but I'll stick to coding on this one. When I finish writing a module, I stare back at it as if I'm a painter looking at his masterpiece. I scrutinize it and eventually come to a conclusion of whether or not its worthy of pushing to production. Some of my work gets pushed because its "good enough" to do the job to my dismay. Others (a few) are masterpieces to me. Even though the user or project manager doesn't see it, I know that I wrote something special. I guess that's what's drives me forward.
I know I'm not the greatest developer. I don't work at a fortune 500 company. Until recently, I didn't even know what great code looks like, let along UI design. Everyday, I do strive forward because I know that it will drive me crazy if I don't at least "try" to reach that level.
Unfortunately, in this industry (like in most), you can get by being mediocre.
Earlier I used to spend so much time worrying about being perfect that many times I wouldn't even start. It's only now I realize the importance of creating good work every day, even though it may not be the best one.
It is almost seems like a muscle that atrophies without use. I wonder if that is why you see benefit in creating works each day? And why programmers are stereotypically said to be not be able to design, even though I see a lot of overlap.
Turns out, a lot of what I spent time on was learning specific UX techniques from different places that looked pretty ugly when they were all smashed together. I think it's analogous to programming (when you learn a concept, you kind of want to force it into the project you're working on, even if there is little to no relevance).
All in all, I agree with the message. Becoming a great designer takes a lot of patience, hard work, and iteration. You have to be okay with throwing entire pieces away in pursuit of something better.
It's easy to be a critic (especially of yourself), but it's so much more important to answer the question 'Why is this bad?'. It's difficult. I'm not aware of any AI that can do this. It's what separates us from the machines... for now :P
This is highly disputable. However, this is good advice to those of us (us!) who have it.
Sometimes "making it" does just take working long and hard enough to get to the point that our output matches our taste--and then everyone else can see how great it is too, and wants to buy it. Success!
Less talked-about is that sometimes its turns out that we actually didn't have such great taste after all. Our output matches our taste but it still doesn't sell in enough volume to make a living.
Or sometimes it turns out that our taste is derivative. A Batman fan who makes a new superhero that simply mimics Batman might not be very successful with it. It's harder to make something original that matches the taste for Batman.
The crappy part is that there is no way to tell in advance who is going to make it or not. So we encourage everyone. The ones who make it will benefit us all...the ones who don't will fade into obscurity. It's a hard truth but it is what it is.
The problem is That Work Shit. No, I don't mean that people are averse to working hard. The contrary is true. Ever see a programmer blow up on his jackass-interrupter boss, because he wanted to keep working done rather than deal with an impromptu status ping? People like to work. They do. Leave them alone and most people will be productive. At least, most people whose efforts will be worth anything will be productive. Who cares if the bottom 20% use freedom and autonomy to slack off? They won't deliver much value no matter how hard you beat them.
Unfortunately, most of us are stuck in this corporate matrix where even cognitive 1-percenters have to sell themselves to middlemen called "managers" who take all the credit, and to take subordinate roles because a bunch of rent-seeking assholes have (in most settings) taken everything important or interesting for themselves. The result is a culture where there's no improvement and where motivation dies, usually around age 30. (People have kids, then decide that their creative existences are over and commence living vicariously through miniature creatures genetically similar to themselves, then find themselves chagrined when most of those turn out to be separate people with their own agendas.) We see this in the shitpile that is 95% of software engineering, where improvement never happens and horrible code gets written and dumbasses make all the decisions.
I don't think people get burned out in the intermediate stages because they're lazy or because they have a childish need for praise. I think they get to a point where they realize they're still not getting enough back to compensate for the obscene (artificially high, due to phony scarcities and corrupt) costs of living so they cut off and go back to their boring paid work.