How Not to Be Overwhelmed
4 banrovegrie 4 5/14/2025, 10:26:23 AM
When starting a huge project or product from scratch how do you guys prevent yourselves from getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of code to write or work to do?
I have a bad habit of trying to deal with this by estimating how much code I can write in a day and seeing how that compounds over time. That way when you see that you can have "x lines of code" written by the end of 2/3 months, it makes you feel okay this much amount of code is enough to finish up the project.
Not sure if this is the ideal way to go about things.
Firstly, whenever I encounter a bug or an idea that I don't want to interrupt my flow, I make a note of it. I'm currently using a Github project board for this. You don't have to use any complicated features to do this, it can be essentially used as a todo list so that you keep track of the things you want to implement. These things should be broken down into small achievable tasks.
I have embraced the idea that this project might take me literally years to finish, or it might never truly be finished. There are a great number of successful software projects that are never finished! Linux, for instance! I've given myself the odd fleeting thought to how much time it would take for a v1.0.0, but never tried to calculate it. I've accepted that it'll be done when it's done. Especially given that I don't know if I'll be too busy to work on it in a few weeks time.
This way, by not worrying about when it'll be done, I'm finding myself in that flow state of just working on the thing that I want to work on right now.
You may need clustered databases with failover. First you have to get enough users for it to matter. So don't start with that. Start with a simple, single database. Yeah, think about the future - pick a database where you can move it to clustered - but don't plan out every detail of how you're going to get there. You don't need it now, and you may never need it.