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I've had this vision for a revolutionary system when I was 12. I think about it every single day. Yet, my only accomplishment is thousands of pages of notes and ideas about possible use cases for this system. I haven't wrote a single line of code. I tried blogging about it, but I can't decide where to start. You can find glimpse of the idea in some of my HN/Reddit posts/comments, but that's about it.

This have never felt satisfied or truly happy since. I don't know what to do next.




I glanced briefly over your posts and it seems that you're dealing with a complex system. The trouble with those is that you can't just break it down to a simple prototype, because by simplifying it you lose exactly the properties you're interested in.

Actually building it, requires a solution to a couple of hard problems, which themselve pull in even more. So the longer you work on it, the slower you make any progress and the easier it is to get lost just by the sheer range of ways to tackle it.

However, somehow those complex ones are just way more interesting for myself, I pick them every time over "the simple things", but the result is, that I too can't show any visible progress, because it's not done yet and no simple prototype can show/imitate the system as a whole. If you ever discover a sound methodology for these kinds of problem, please tell me about it.


Have you read The Lean Startup? That can help.

Also, TSTTCPW (the simplest thing that could possibly work). Pry a little piece of it loose. Don't think too much about which piece. Build the simplest possible version of that little piece. "Simplest" can be a tremendous challenge in itself, because scope creep and gold-plating are so easy. Part of the work will be decoupling your little piece from the rest of it. But make something that works!


Thousands of pages of documentation must be how Hell feels like for engineers ;)

I'd start by reducing it. Either generalize or make it less ambitious (whatever fits better your idea).


I'd set up a wiki to bring the notes and ideas in order.




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