Hi all 👋. I got, to be honest, we as developers have the opportunity to build whatever we can imagine but sometimes it just sucks having so many possibilities, it starts to get tiring really fast. So I got to ask you guys.

How do you decide on your jobs or side projects what is really important to accomplish without getting sidetracked?

I think... what matters to you first.

I try to focus on two things:

- stuff with user privacy in mind and to fuck with the big surveillance companies if possible (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc)
- stuff that makes me learn/challenge my way of thinking (trying to build an insane-high performance application right now that requires me to program very carefully)

@linuxxx @vintprox thank you both, and what do you do when you're thinking in multiple features for a project? how do you focus on the most important thing?

@duckycode That can be challenging! With the performance project, i already wrote a lot when noticing that it wasn't written THAT well as for performance so i sat down for hours and will rewrite half the goddamn thing now to hopefully save some micro/miliseconds!

But for me, the features come automatically, but i focus on user privacy and security the most.

@M1sf3t yeah! haha in my case everything looks too cool so I get sidetracked and finish doing a shitty project

@linuxxx wow sounds like you're truly passionate about that project, huge respect for spending so much time in getting things right!

So you try to focus everything on doing features that always go with those principles in mind? privacy and security

@M1sf3t "They seem to focus on polish and pretty colors more than they do actual code" damn it has happened to me multiple times now, got to agree with that

I usually try to prototype a "good enough to work" application with a minimum feature set.

When that's working, I'll usually reflect what annoyed / bugged me most.

Like... OK the process handling isn't bad, but since I forgot quite a lot of details during design phase, the database layer / design is as sad as a pizza turned to charcoal.

It's usually the phase where I draw a lot of process designs, what's happening, why is it happening, should it be happening.

Lots of colors involved.

Prototype. What's fuckity. Plan out changes. Rinse and repeat.

When I'm satisfied with the result, I'll start adding features. Rinse and repeat, one feature after another.

I'm very nitpicky in the beginning to have the most complete, yet feature less prototype in the beginning...

If I notice I'll get side tracked I either git stash or git switch to save progress, and then just skip it to not loose focus.

So... My first prototypes are usually frankensteens. Not pretty. But solid.

oh I really like that approach @IntrusionCM pretty cool way to work on projects!! awesome thank you

@duckycode NP.

One additional hint:

It makes sense, especially in the beginning, to do things wrong by choice.

What I experienced myself over and over and why I like this approach is that when you try to do everything right immediately you'll get frustrated. Frustration leads to crap.

Eg: when you want to create an Excel Export, start by an CSV export. Get the basic stuff right. CSV is very simple, takes no time and let's you get a feeling how things are coming together.

Try to find the most mundane and boring starting point before incrementally implementing harder tasks.

Usually this works with everything, you'll just have to think a bit about the mundane thing.

Side stuff is whatever I want to use myself.

@duckycode With personal projects, yes! And not only because i stand for this but i mean.. Privacy is a basic human right and people very often forget that or don't care, and for privacy, you often need security but i also simply don't want to get hacked 😅

But especially security as well since i work as a cybersecurity engineer 😄

I focus on making things that'll actually help people in their life, job, whatever