For me there's a spiritual element to it too. Some people just "get ideas from somewhere".
The more ideas you have, the more you get. I expressly try to have ideas and combine different things or inspirations together.
I use "writing is thinking" to develop ideas, I've been journalling ideas since 2013 and they're all computer software related. I am up to 700 entries. Links are in my profile.
I also publish submit ideas on halfbakery.com under the user chronological.
One thing I learned recently though is that to follow through with an idea requires 100s of skills. I don't want to get stuck in a local optimum of trying to create say, a perfect piece of futuristic piece of software perfectly or a new programming language perfectly on first try. I need to just go out and do stuff and explore by doing things with my ideas. Sure I'll have digressions where I explore an interesting idea, but the important thing is I try to keep doing different tasks that get me nearer the ideas' aims.
Good comment, I've been struggling with the "100s of skills" thing a bit recently. I have a small side project I've been working on but have somewhat stalled as I keep running up against the limits of what I already know. The only solution to this is to just keep grinding and trying new things as I keep trying to build the thing, but the loss of momentum every time I find the next brick wall is demotivating.
Anyway, I'm currently procrastinating on that exact side project (I try to sit down and put an hour in on it at least once a day).
My project is a Phoenix app, and the thing that's been stalling me lately is that the feature I'm working on seemed like a good candidate to be built with Liveview, which I have almost no experience with. The screen in question is where a user can put together a routine from their exercises (it's an app for organizing your practice routine for a musical instrument).
I want users to be able to drag and drop the exercises they add to a routine into their preferred order. So I spent my hour and change today reading through the 4th chapter of the LiveView book and then hooked up a live route to a page in my app.
As of right now it's not even close to done, but I do have a basic scaffold in place now, and I started putting together a basic HTML page in another file to experiment with the look and feel of the thing.
I'm not much of a frontend guy so another stumbling block has just been trying to piece together things that look halfway decent. Phoenix 1.7 ships with Tailwind so I've also been trying to wrap my head around that.
It wasn't all that much really, but I'm one step further along, and hopefully have a little less friction for the next session.
So far, I've clocked 12 hours on the project, with a goal of putting in 162 hours over the next few months (to match the amount of time I spent playing Factorio last year). 12 hours doesn't feel like that much to me, but I've learned a good amount about Phoenix so far. A lot of the first few hours was spent learning about Ecto (the main Elixir/Phoenix database framework).
Anyway, it's often frustrating - I want to be at the point where I can just sit down with an idea and make it happen. But it does feel good to "put the reps in," and hopefully the time I'm investing will pay off in a more accessible set of skills.
Wow - that sounds really interesting. Well done for persevering :-)
I think LiveView is a really interesting idea and can be extremely powerful to building responsive applications.
I've always wondered how LiveView scales when you add a load balancer to the mix and what you need to do to cause it to work at scale.
I'm not much of a frontend (css/html) person either!
I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project but sometimes they do join up together and I merge the work together.
> I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project
I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that.
The current project has been interesting because it's forcing me to take a bigger picture view and grapple with the difficulties of integrating lots of different modules together into something cohesive. As I get closer to releasing something, I'll also have to figure out some things I've never done before - how to accept payments, set up an LLC, and so on and so forth.
I've been repeatedly telling myself that even if I never have a single paying user (well, besides myself), that the knowledge I gain by going from an empty text file to an actual "business entity" capable of accepting a payment for a service will be worth a lot as I continue my career. Truly "full stack", you could say.
> I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that.
Whenever I set myself a large project and prepare to undertake something large, my motivation to work on it changes and I start wanting to do other things.
But when I just commit to do a small task of part of something large I feel I can do anything I want. I just need to get the small task done. You can scale a mountain doing a little part at a time.
Scaling doesn't seem likely to be a major concern in my case, although it's definitely worth thinking about. I do eventually plan to release this thing to the public though. I guess if I end up with enough users to need to worry about any kind of scale, that would be a good problem to have!
I like to think that this comes from an attitude of recognising ideas as they emerge, and being willing to tolerate seemingly bad ones, chewing on them a bit until they either get better or are recognized as ones worth dropping.
I think most people are afraid to acknowledge their ideas, or at least afraid to let them out
“Too much imagination is much rarer than too little; when it occurs, it usually involves its unfortunate possessor in frustration and failure-unless he is sensible enough merely to write about his ideas, and not to attempt their realization.”
"Some companies have "skunk works" - secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business."
Smoking Skunk weed does this to the brain as well, which is perhaps a stealth reference to skunk works.
Main property of Skunk weed is, extremely high levels of THC and low levels of CBD.
Psychosis is also seen in pregnant women or post partum due to the strain on their body. If ever you wanted an example look no further than Ridley Scott's Alien Chestburster destroying the host or even this https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbywolves/comments/j5ky8t/ridl...
So what does Psychosis tell us? Its a brain immunological issue. Clues from the Skunk THC:CBD ratio.
Neutrophil's are the first (innate) immune cell response to be recruited to sites of inflammation in order to engulf pathogens. The increased size of neutrophils helps to engulf larger pathogens, including bacteria biofilms which will plague people towards end of life.
Omega-3's are a precursor to endocannabinoids aka the phyto CBD seen in weed and other food sources.
Hence why the military have developed skunk, you get a double whammy punishment of breaking the law whilst also being psychologically cracked in order to give up secrets for law enforcement purposes via medical centres, like something out of a MK Ultra mind control programme adapted and coerced on the wider population today.
I believe Nietzsche was famous for saying this, but is true for many brilliant thinkers such as Aristotle & Plato(School of Athens shows this), Kierkegaard, Seneca, and Kant to name a few.
> Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel… Sitting still… is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.
I would also add that ideas are EMERGENT, i.e. the underlying components of an idea “self-assemble” into a picture either in one person’s imagination or in the collaborative imagination of two or more individuals, such as in a conversation or a joint white board session.
I believe that the process of emergence is fundamental to our sense of perception.
There is an interesting approach to systematically generating new ideas called TRIZ, which Samsung utilizes. The basic concept involves thinking about the ideal solution first. Typically, this means maximizing contradictions instead of trying to minimize them. For instance, imagine a bridge that works, but doesn't physically exist. You’ll get some kind of teleport. Or imagine a lamp that works, but doesn’t exist. You’ll get some kind of luminous space. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
When I come up with only one new idea a day for a business or technology that would require a team to develop, it's because it's not a very inspirational day.
I'm well aware there are teams and leaders all over the place with far fewer ideas than would be best, or almost nothing at all, but they're not my teams.
That's not what I'm trying to do anyway, I've already got a lifetime of those.
Far more rare are the concepts which could really be brought to life starting with almost no resources at all.
Already got a lifetime of those too, but it's the implementation that brings it to life and before making the next commitment to my long-standing top choice, I've always remained open to alternatives that pop up all the time. That's how the top choice gets to be the top choice.
Very different people are capable of having very different types of abundance.
I'm reminded about the lady that cleans out Willie Nelson's tour bus.
You can only imagine what she has found over the years.
He's such a prolific songwriter but he publishes only the best of the best. And even then most of them are not absolute smash hits. Only a small handful have achieved that status even though the whole body of his work is very highly regarded.
But each time the tour bus is cleaned, she picks up all the little scraps of paper that Willie has jotted down a few things on, and fully disposes of them completely.
Well aware that at least a few would be more suitable for the radio than people are generally hearing at the time from some other more popular artists.
You can't let that kind of stuff fall into the wrong hands.
Patrick Gunkel spent a lot of time thinking about Ideas and their ecosystem. How they arise. How they are related. Much of this never made it to academic publication but here is a website that curates some of his work:
http://ideonomy.mit.edu/
It will be great to advance the understanding of this work.
Generally, new ideas do not arise from trying to think of new ideas. It's like entrepreneurs searching for a profitable business idea, without having a need or problem to solve.
The more ideas you have, the more you get. I expressly try to have ideas and combine different things or inspirations together.
I use "writing is thinking" to develop ideas, I've been journalling ideas since 2013 and they're all computer software related. I am up to 700 entries. Links are in my profile.
I also publish submit ideas on halfbakery.com under the user chronological.
One thing I learned recently though is that to follow through with an idea requires 100s of skills. I don't want to get stuck in a local optimum of trying to create say, a perfect piece of futuristic piece of software perfectly or a new programming language perfectly on first try. I need to just go out and do stuff and explore by doing things with my ideas. Sure I'll have digressions where I explore an interesting idea, but the important thing is I try to keep doing different tasks that get me nearer the ideas' aims.
Anyway, I'm currently procrastinating on that exact side project (I try to sit down and put an hour in on it at least once a day).
So, back to it, to learn something new!
Thanks for your reply. Really encouraging.
My project is a Phoenix app, and the thing that's been stalling me lately is that the feature I'm working on seemed like a good candidate to be built with Liveview, which I have almost no experience with. The screen in question is where a user can put together a routine from their exercises (it's an app for organizing your practice routine for a musical instrument).
I want users to be able to drag and drop the exercises they add to a routine into their preferred order. So I spent my hour and change today reading through the 4th chapter of the LiveView book and then hooked up a live route to a page in my app.
As of right now it's not even close to done, but I do have a basic scaffold in place now, and I started putting together a basic HTML page in another file to experiment with the look and feel of the thing.
I'm not much of a frontend guy so another stumbling block has just been trying to piece together things that look halfway decent. Phoenix 1.7 ships with Tailwind so I've also been trying to wrap my head around that.
It wasn't all that much really, but I'm one step further along, and hopefully have a little less friction for the next session.
So far, I've clocked 12 hours on the project, with a goal of putting in 162 hours over the next few months (to match the amount of time I spent playing Factorio last year). 12 hours doesn't feel like that much to me, but I've learned a good amount about Phoenix so far. A lot of the first few hours was spent learning about Ecto (the main Elixir/Phoenix database framework).
Anyway, it's often frustrating - I want to be at the point where I can just sit down with an idea and make it happen. But it does feel good to "put the reps in," and hopefully the time I'm investing will pay off in a more accessible set of skills.
I think LiveView is a really interesting idea and can be extremely powerful to building responsive applications.
I've always wondered how LiveView scales when you add a load balancer to the mix and what you need to do to cause it to work at scale.
I'm not much of a frontend (css/html) person either!
I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project but sometimes they do join up together and I merge the work together.
I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that.
The current project has been interesting because it's forcing me to take a bigger picture view and grapple with the difficulties of integrating lots of different modules together into something cohesive. As I get closer to releasing something, I'll also have to figure out some things I've never done before - how to accept payments, set up an LLC, and so on and so forth.
I've been repeatedly telling myself that even if I never have a single paying user (well, besides myself), that the knowledge I gain by going from an empty text file to an actual "business entity" capable of accepting a payment for a service will be worth a lot as I continue my career. Truly "full stack", you could say.
Whenever I set myself a large project and prepare to undertake something large, my motivation to work on it changes and I start wanting to do other things.
But when I just commit to do a small task of part of something large I feel I can do anything I want. I just need to get the small task done. You can scale a mountain doing a little part at a time.
I like to think that this comes from an attitude of recognising ideas as they emerge, and being willing to tolerate seemingly bad ones, chewing on them a bit until they either get better or are recognized as ones worth dropping.
I think most people are afraid to acknowledge their ideas, or at least afraid to let them out
https://kristinposehn.substack.com/p/ramanujan-dreams?r=feux...
Arthur C. Clarke
"Some companies have "skunk works" - secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business."
Smoking Skunk weed does this to the brain as well, which is perhaps a stealth reference to skunk works.
Too much Skunk can lead to psychosis. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31480234
Main property of Skunk weed is, extremely high levels of THC and low levels of CBD.
Psychosis is also seen in pregnant women or post partum due to the strain on their body. If ever you wanted an example look no further than Ridley Scott's Alien Chestburster destroying the host or even this https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbywolves/comments/j5ky8t/ridl...
So what does Psychosis tell us? Its a brain immunological issue. Clues from the Skunk THC:CBD ratio.
Psychosis can be treated with Omega-3's namely EPA as it helps increase the size of neutrophils by upto 38% and increase duration of cells. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6834330/#sec3-i... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/009069...
Neutrophil's are the first (innate) immune cell response to be recruited to sites of inflammation in order to engulf pathogens. The increased size of neutrophils helps to engulf larger pathogens, including bacteria biofilms which will plague people towards end of life.
Omega-3's are a precursor to endocannabinoids aka the phyto CBD seen in weed and other food sources.
Hence why the military have developed skunk, you get a double whammy punishment of breaking the law whilst also being psychologically cracked in order to give up secrets for law enforcement purposes via medical centres, like something out of a MK Ultra mind control programme adapted and coerced on the wider population today.
Ideas arise from physical movement.
I believe Nietzsche was famous for saying this, but is true for many brilliant thinkers such as Aristotle & Plato(School of Athens shows this), Kierkegaard, Seneca, and Kant to name a few.
> Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel… Sitting still… is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.
Ideas arise when one is lost in thought, making automatic movements.
I believe that the process of emergence is fundamental to our sense of perception.
I'm well aware there are teams and leaders all over the place with far fewer ideas than would be best, or almost nothing at all, but they're not my teams.
That's not what I'm trying to do anyway, I've already got a lifetime of those.
Far more rare are the concepts which could really be brought to life starting with almost no resources at all.
Already got a lifetime of those too, but it's the implementation that brings it to life and before making the next commitment to my long-standing top choice, I've always remained open to alternatives that pop up all the time. That's how the top choice gets to be the top choice.
Very different people are capable of having very different types of abundance.
I'm reminded about the lady that cleans out Willie Nelson's tour bus.
You can only imagine what she has found over the years.
He's such a prolific songwriter but he publishes only the best of the best. And even then most of them are not absolute smash hits. Only a small handful have achieved that status even though the whole body of his work is very highly regarded.
But each time the tour bus is cleaned, she picks up all the little scraps of paper that Willie has jotted down a few things on, and fully disposes of them completely.
Well aware that at least a few would be more suitable for the radio than people are generally hearing at the time from some other more popular artists.
You can't let that kind of stuff fall into the wrong hands.
It will be great to advance the understanding of this work.