In the talk “Inventing on Principle“, Bret Victor talks about the importance of establishing a guiding principle that defines your work.
His guiding principle is that ideas are important. He believes that it is ideas that give meaning to our lives. But ideas start off fragile — they need to be nurtured and enabled to grow. They need an environment in which to mature. In order to nurture ideas, he emphasizes the importance of creators having an immediate connection with their creations and he offers several brilliant examples of ways that we, as engineers, can establish immediacy in our creative loops.
In doing this, he demos several amazing environments that he has built for various engineering disciplines. All of these environments give immediate and useful feedback to the creator.
Some tools of this nature may exist for your editor, and you absolutely should dig up what you can find to increase the quantity of feedback and decrease the time to receiving it. However, it also occurs to me that in many cases this immediate feedback may be a non generalize-able special purpose kind of feedback. It could be considered ‘scaffolding’ for your project.
There are very few engineering disciplines, after all, that output a product that doesn’t need some kind of ephemeral single-use material in its construction. Effort is often put into building something that will be thrown away when then final product is complete.
I hate wasted work. I think all programmers hate wasted work. I especially hate it. Even though I love what I do, I am always so hesitant to build something when there is a possibility that it won’t ever be useful for anything. I have a low tolerance for risk when it comes to my time.
However, I would like to identify what kinds of things I should build that could considered “scaffolding” for my projects; those things which can’t be automated or toolified or used on every project, but which will make the development process for that project much smoother, feedback faster and development more fun. I would like to constantly look for ways to maximize immediate visibility into my software. And I would like to be more okay with throwing stuff away at the end of a project once it has served its purpose.
I love building things.