Cheng's Blog

By Vince Lombardi:

The joy is in creating, not maintaining

Linking to the original post

Summary

1. I don't know anything
   Don't limit your thinking to dogma's and the conventional thinking. Judge yourself if other people's opinion is a valuable experience to learn from or simply a view limited by his/her own experience. Quotes directly from Paul:

   If you believe yourself to be a rational person, then you're in the trap.

   Things didn't work in the past doesn't mean it won't work in the future. Likewise, what worked before may not work again.

2. Kill all daemon process
   Computers run faster after restart (because the elimination of long running daemon processes in the background), so does human mind. Purposely creating silent moments everyday to eliminate the voices of "doubt, anger and others' opinions" that drag down our spirite.

3. Yes, and thank you.
   When dealing with setbacks, either setbacks from life or negative feedbacks from others, say "Yes, and thank you." It maintains the "forward flow of life". (Don't be stalled for long)

4. Choose the more interesting path
   This resonates with "The joy is in creating, not maintaining". For things that you can already see the outcome is not interesting. For things that are completely random is not interesting. Interesting things have to be genuinely interesting to you and by doing it you can discover something new.

5. Love what you do
   Real work usually comes with unpleasant or dull moments. Love what you do allows you to sustain and work with them.

6. Maintain a healthy disregard for the impossible
   Encourage feel thinking and doing the impossible.

Mike Bostock (the author of D3.js) gave a talk about 'Design is a Search Problem'. Here is the distill of the talk:

Prototypes should emphasize speed over polish

It needn't look good, or even have labels. Make just enough to evaluate the idea. Then decide whether to go straight or turn. Identify the intent of the prototype. What hypothesis are you testing?

Transition from exploring to refining near deadline.

Reduce the amount of explorations as deadline approaches and start to focus on what's working.

Delete code as you go. Be ruthless.

Delete branches as you go (Mike uses git branches to manage his work).

Make your process reproducible.

A build system provides machine-readable documentation. Accelerate the reuse of parts from past projects. Here is the blog link he is refering to.

Try bad ideas deliberately.

You can't evaluate a visualization absent the data.Don't get too attached to your current favorite. Don't get stuck at local maximum; go down to go up. Design is chaotic.

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

From Momentum