Today’s Almost One Paragraph Blog: The Stall Point

Posted on January 23rd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Product Design, Programming.

How do you decide when to throw out your code/idea and sleep on it/do a rewrite?

Most people intuitively know when they’ve gotten stuck. Suddenly, after plowing through mountains of work, returns suddenly diminish dramatically. People who program late at night will recognize this phenomena; coding turns from an art to a masturbatory exercise in frustration. (This also comes up when doing late night work as a student, interestingly.)

The reason people can overlook the stall point is that it’s not one point. If we got pitched headlong into a freezing room, we’d be far less likely to leave the thermostat alone.

Being acutely sensitive to even the smallest amounts of frustration is a good way to pick up on incoming stall points.

Be intolerant of annoyances.

3 comments.

Tim

Comment on January 23rd, 2008.

Most programmers tend to err on the side of rewriting too early on other peoples code, and rewriting too late on their own code.

Chris

Comment on January 23rd, 2008.

I didn’t add that non-stall point reasons for redos usually increase frustration instead of relieving it.

Well, they do.

The Bloj » One Paragraph Blog: How scary is the rewrite?

Pingback on February 18th, 2008.

[...] *The usual caveats: If you have a problem that can be solved with a small change, I would recommend sticking to that before resorting to bigger changes. But once you start seeing so-called small changes multiply, you may have hit the stall point. [...]

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