Unknowns

An all too common problem in software is that you now have to do some work, but for you, it is a brand new task. You've never done anything like this before.

So, right out of the gate, there are a lot of unknowns.

One way to handle this is to dive in directly. Just go straight into the things you have to do and thrash your way through the problems one by one.

In the midst of doing that though, you’ll probably have to make a lot of decisions. Setup, configuration, conventions, organization, etc. But more often than not the correct decision is not the most intuitive one. They are often quite different.

If you’ve been around for a long long time, your intuition has probably been honed by plenty of similar experiences, but if you are relatively new to this type of work, it is not. The odds are that your intuition will lead you astray.

Some people think that they are saving time by just experimenting. Try a bunch of stuff and if it seems to work, then push it out.

But the better approach has always been to stand on the shoulders of giants. That is, in the same situation, you bounce out quickly and see what other people have done. Not in-depth research, but enough light reading that you can now make a better choice.

Do not make up your own way of doing things. Whatever you make up will end up costing you more time than you would have spent doing a bit of reading.

After you read stuff, you might not choose to follow it, and you certainly should never choose to follow it blindly. Instead, you might just build on what you’ve learned, and use that to improve how you do things.

If you rely on random guesses, then more often than not you will be wrong.

As you get more experienced, you’ll probably find that you dive blindly in far less often. You’re more likely to do some initial reading, look around for great references, and try to get some depth to your understanding first.

The more you know upfront, the better off things will go. You obviously don’t have time to know everything, so you do have to pick and choose, but more knowledge is always better than less knowledge. And getting knowledge from more experienced people is always far better than getting knowledge from overconfident ones.