on successfully doing projects

random thoughts, will refine later

i used to always be too ambitious about the things i wanted to build. i would have an idea i’m excited about, and then start thinking of the endless features that i had to add to make it really unique and interesting. of course, i would get overwhelmed, not know where to start, determine that it’s too difficult, and give up.

learning from these failures, i then would try to do known, “good” projects to teach myself things…but a lot of the time I didn’t really care about the project concept. it had been done before, i wasn’t exercising any creativity, it still had difficulties because it was new knowledge, and I still would give up.

• scoping is very important!
• doing small projects to learn new skills matter, but they also have to be something genuinely interesting in order to stay motivated
• doing projects independently is very important to be able to work at your own pace and not feel pressured
  • group projects are also a great opportunity to learn from others with different knowledge BUT the people you pick are important
    • someone with less or very similar knowledge/skills can make it difficult to progress when you are also a beginner
    • someone with far more knowledge can make it intimidating and difficult to contribute, and also deprive you of learning opportunities because they can figure things out before you do
    • someone with similar but complementary knowledge/skills where you can both learn from each other and make up for what the other doesn’t know is ideal! same motivation levels is also important

I also often faced paralysis from thinking I didn’t know enough about a subject to start building something. This is a useless mentality. You learn from doing! Just do it! If it’s bad, you learn from that! Don’t expect to make something good when you’re just starting out, that will come from more doing.

• I have always been put off by the idea of writing bad code for a project due to inexperience and then having to majorly refactor later on. but this is a necessary and inevitable pain to actually grow…

projects i tried to do but were way too ambitious for my skill level

• a multi-ending visual novel game when i had zero Unity or game-engine or C# scripting experience and hadn’t even really done any tutorials LOL
• todo

projects i tried to do purely for learning but got bored of:

• financial tracker
  • i didn’t really care LOL, i wasn’t going to make anything better than what existed, which is fine, but the concept itself also didn’t excite me
• todo list
  • same reasoning

some pivotal projects i was able to complete

• AR Student Emotion Analyzer
  • I was interested in the concept
  • I had sufficient experience using LLMs from other small hackathon projects, I utilized and referenced existing resources to learn how to implement certain functionalities, I had known basic knowledge about YOLO and CNNs from coursework at this point despite not applying them to a project prior
• Crown of Persuasion
  • made in a team with a balanced/complementary taste and skillset
  • simple game mechanics that were definitely feasible after I had gained some Unity experience through a research position
• simple chrome extension to group tabs of the same host name
  • a tool i genuinely needed due to extremely poor tab management
  • extension of an existing chrome extension tutorial that helped me learn a little more javascript and how chrome extensions work
  • very simple but i actually still use it lol

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Plan milestones across the intended timeline.