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This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something valuable that's original.
I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle, and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components. Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.
But are those worthwhile projects? I suppose there's only one way to find out.
(I'd give that symphonic cycle a listen though).
But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
(Because, I believe, either the flood of people into the market space never knew it, or it wasn't the dominant model for exploitation of the user base.)
People have made orreries (rotating solar system models) for centuries.
I’m designing a digital version with over 600 LEDs. It’s a massive challenge and I’m pretty sure I’ll be the first.
I’ve been making things like it for years:
Https://digitalhorology.com
https://worrydream.com/refs/
It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.
Yet all those stories in all their forms still sell today, and still impress people.
Not worrying about unoriginality frees you to just enjoy yourself… and just maybe do something original.
Would I rather reminisce in my old age about all the things that I could've done that would've set me apart from all of my peers or spend my old age in a constant brag about all the fun I had, completely satisfied because I had chosen activities and challenged myself to succeed at building skills and experiences that made my own life interesting and challenged me mentally or physically.
You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.
Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.
It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.
That's a real issue. In the US today, you have to get to a minimum viable product early and find someone to throw money at it to make it scale fast. Things that take years to make work at all are hard to fund, even at a modest level. Xerography and color TV are technologies that took decades to make work at all.
This is partly the effect of a weakened patent system.
It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to multiple processes.
It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for most application logic and people are still not using queues where they should be. People think of queues as some expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the benefits.
I think the issue is just that it's incredibly hard to sell an abstract idea and incredibly hard to convince people to abandon ingrained habit.
I created a testing framework where you wrote half a test in YAML and the framework filled in the rest based on program output.
It made writing tests quick, easy and even kinda fun.
Moreover if you added a bit of explanation prose to the YAML and used a slightly nicer example scenario it would generate you guaranteed up-to-date readable markdown how to docs. For free.
But, these things are culturally chorey and there's a shame culture built around them.
I can’t think of many places, even one if I’m being honest, where I’ve needed what you describe.
You will produce a completely unique page.