The Stoic Way: Building Better Code, One Step at a time

Yesterday, I was reading a book The stoic mind by Addi Osmani and in Chapter 3, I encountered a profound statement: "First do it, then do it right, then do it better." It immediately resonated with me because it’s a similar concept I've learned when building software as a developer.

As a developer, you're inevitably going to encounter tough challenges.

Perhaps your new project requires mastering a new programing language to solve a specific issue, or maybe feature request that you think it’s impossible to solve, maybe you’re stuck on a particular tricky bug.

When i first started working as a developer, this situations, send my heart racing and my stress level is sky rocketing.

my immediate response is try to find a way to get out of this task and pick something else that I'm comfortable doing. For years I've been like that and guess what?

I didn't grow that much early on my career as a developer, because I’m afraid to fail, I’m afraid to be critiqued that my code is awful and I haven’t published any of my side projects because I was aiming for perfection.

Just start somewhere.

if you have a project or task and you don’t know what to do? just start somewhere, don’t worry about optimizing it, just try to make it work and just embrace the MVP mindset, getting minimum viable product out.

because most of the time even your code is awful and unoptimized, your solution is still 100% better rather than not having that feature release or publish that project at all.

Refine and correct

Once you get your MVP out, you’ve taken from the previous step it’s time to refine and correct, in this stage is about learning from feedback, identifying areas of improvements and making adjustments accordingly.

Strive for Continuous Improvement

Once your feature or project is out, journey doesn’t end there, the final step is to continuously improve by iterating towards an ideal end-state.