Milwaukee Hack 'n' Tell Retrospective

A few weeks ago I participated in a hack 'n' tell organized by RokkinCat and held at Ward 4 in Milwaukee. RokkinCat organizes these because, as they explain in their blog post, Wisconsin is last in startup activity, and I was happy to participate to try and make my home state a better place to work and live.

Like my previous hackathon, I feel like I accomplished a lot and learned a lot as well, so I wanted to talk about what I felt led to a successful day. I'm definitely going to be tooting my own horn a little bit here, but I feel like I managed to implement some "productivity secrets" that a younger me or other developers might find helpful!

Effective Strategies for Productivity

Learn Something or Make Something

On episode 272 of Ruby Rogues, the guest Amir put forth a mantra - something along the lines of "When you're working on a project, you need to decide if you want to learn something or make something". This really spoke to me, because oftentimes I will come up with an idea for a useful tool, and I'll think to myself "oh, this sounds like a great opportunity to learn {LANGUAGE,LIBRARY,WHATEVER} $X!"

This raises the barrier to starting the project considerably, since now not only do I have to carve out time for working on the idea itself, but I also need to attain a base level of competence with that new thing I'm trying out. And even if I manage to summon the willpower to start, I work that much more slowly as I try to navigate what the project needs as well as the idiosyncrasies of whatever I'm learning.

For this hack 'n' tell, I really wanted to be pragmatic and clear out some of the project ideas I've had recently. So I approached the hack 'n' tell with two things in mind:

• I would only select ideas for projects that didn't require me to learn anything, or only required me to learn a small thing. For example, learning a new utility library was ok; learning how to write browser extensions was not.
• I would stick to languages and libraries I was already familiar with.

Regarding the second point, I decided to use two languages I feel confident with: Perl and Elm. Perl isn't the most glamorous choice these days, but if you know it well, you can really get a lot done fast. Elm is a little trendier, but I feel that the hype is justified - Elm has a lot of things going for it that allow you to be really productive when working with it.

Preparation

There's a Confucius quote that...well, frankly I looked up specifically for this post to sound insightful, but that doesn't make it any less relevant:

  In all things success depends on previous preparation, and without such previous
  preparation there is sure to be failure.

I am a chronic under-preparer - I feel that I would be much more successful in my life if I could make a better habit of preparing for things. So during the week preceding the hack 'n' tell, I spent probably an hour or so going through my list of coding ideas I keep in my Getting Things Done system. If I felt that I couldn't finish a given idea in a day, or, as I said above, if I needed to learn something completely new, I dismissed the idea for the hack 'n' tell. From this, I used Idea Fight to order my ideas and come up with a "top five" list. This helped me remove the decision process from when I was supposed to be productive, and wow did it work! I also made sure to gather all of the materials I needed in advance - I downloaded data sets, gathered documentation, etc to make sure I could just focus on making something.

Decide on an MVP

One big problem I have with ideas is I tend to dream big - really big. I'll dwell on a new idea for hours, or on and off over days, raising constant "what if"s about how amazing the project could be someday.

The key word there is "could" - it's ok to dream, but I need to plant my feet on the ground some more. The problem with having project sprinkled with pipe dream ideas is it can make starting feel overwhelming, which is why I feel like I never start on my ideas!

So after I decided on my top five projects, I spent just a few minutes thinking about them. What is the MVP - the minimum viable product - for each of them? You can always add your flashy ideas later, but it's good to have a minimal prototype so you have some momentum and you can see if the reality of the idea matches your imagination!

Challenges, Lessons, and Changes for Next Time

While I feel that the day was pretty productive, there were a few old habits I still fell back on:

I didn't commit to Git

Even though I created Git repositories for each project, I failed to make incremental commits over the course of the day. I usually beat this drum at work and in other projects I work with, so it's something I would like to improve upon.

The Code is Messy

Not all of the code, but a good chunk of it is pretty messy. This kind of ties into the MVP/prototype lesson from above (is code cleanliness part of the MVP?), but there's certainly a spectrum, and I would like to move towards the cleaner end of that spectrum.

I didn't socialize enough!

I am a pretty shy person by nature - I struggle with introducing myself, but once I get comfortable, I feel like my enthusiasm really shines through. I didn't take the opportunity to get to know a lot of people at the hack 'n' tell, and that's part of the reason I went there! I could've just stayed at home and worked there if I just wanted to code, but I attended to get to know some of the fascinating people working on interesting things in the Milwaukee area.

At the end of the day, people who wanted to presented their projects to the group. There were some really cool projects people were working on - one guy was working on a HoloLens program to help physical therapy patients out, one group was working on sketches for an animated short they were doing, and others were just playing with technology they'd heard about and found interesting. Next time I would like to get to know some of the people better.

Focus on Fun

For the next hack 'n' tell I do, I plan on focusing less on productivity and more on doing something fun, whether that means making a game, or learning something new. While useful things are great, having fun by expanding your mind or making something fun is important too.