A passion for programming. Chapter 19. Right Now

About transfer

This is the translation of the 19th chapter of The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development . Its author, Chad Fowler, is a talented Ruby developer, a well-known speaker at conferences devoted to Ruby and IT in general. Former saxophonist, and now - CTO 6Wunderkinder.



Project translation of the book on github .









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Imagine that you are in competition with a prize of $ 100,000. The first team to make software that implements an A / R application receives a prize. You and a team of colleagues registered to participate. The competition will take all weekend. To win, your code must be fully tested and implement a minimum set of requirements. You start on Saturday morning and you have time until Monday morning to complete the work. The first team to finish before Monday will win. If none of the teams succeeds, the one that has implemented more features wins.



You carefully read the requirements for the application. Looking at this feature set, you realize that the system you want to implement, in terms of size and capabilities, is similar to the ones you worked on earlier. While your team agreed on a goal - to finish by mid-Sunday, in passing you ask yourself the question: “How is it that you spend weeks working in an office with this kind of software, but are you going to handle the only weekend?”



But when the competition begins and you are immersed in the work, you realize that your team intends to achieve its goal. The whole team on the rise, stamps the feature for the features, corrects the bugs, makes design decisions in a split second and brings the matter to the end. You feel great. At meetings and meetings in the office, you often dreamed of taking a small team out of a bureaucratic environment and sweeping through the application development process in record time.



Many of us have this dream. We know that our work processes slow us down. Not only they, but we know that the speed of our environment is the cause of our slowdown.



Parkinson's law says that

Work fills the time allotted to it.

The sad thing is that even if we don’t want to follow this path, we can fall into the trap, especially if we have tasks that we don’t really want to do.



In the case of a weekend competition, you don’t have time to delay tasks, so you don’t postpone them. You cannot delay decision making, so you do not delay. You cannot avoid boring work and you know that you have to do it so quickly that no work can become very boring.



Parkinson's law is an empirical observation, not the inevitable fate of a person. Feelings of urgency, even artificial, are enough to double or triple the productivity. Try it and you will see. You can make tasks faster. You can do them now. You can bring them to the end, instead of just talking about it.



If you treat your projects as a competition, you will bring them to the end much faster than if you treated them like a prison cell. Create movement. Be the one pushing. Do not relax.



Always be one to ask:

What can we do right now?

Act!

1. Consider the tasks that you have been sitting on for a very long time, projects that have already started to become covered with mold or in which you are a little stuck.
   
   Choose one so that you can do it just during the breaks in your normal work, when you usually surf the Internet, check email or have a very long lunch. Turn a multi-month project into a project that you will do in less than a week.

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PS Error messages are accepted in the LAN.