Start In The Middle

Friday, May 21st, 2010

When it comes time to start a new project, you should start in the middle, not at the beginning:

Has this ever happened to you? You wake up one day with a great new idea for applying bayesian filtering to twitter streams to filter out the pictures of Joel’s new puppy spam. You’re totally convinced it’s what the world needs. It’s the startup that’s finally going to help you to break out of your day job maintaining PHP payroll software stock supermarket shelf stockers. So what do you do? You do this:

  1. Fire up your IDE and start a new website project
  2. Whip up a login page and get the user account basics set up
  3. Decide OpenID’s really where it’s at these days and hit stackoverflow for a good OpenID provider plugin
  4. Run into problems getting it to accept Google accounts and spend half the night debugging it

Wait, what? How did this happen? Getting OpenID working isn’t fun. It’s almost the definition of not fun.

I didn’t want to do all this, I just wanted to make an awesome bayesian twitter filter, but somehow there’s all this stuff I have to get through first.

— Me (swear words redacted)

My hard disk is littered with projects that I started, got half way through setting up without ever really getting to the good bit, then abandoned. I suspect yours is, too.

The right way to start a bayesian twitter filter is to apply a bayesian filter to content from a twitter stream. I know. It looks like this:

  1. Google for some bayesian filter code
  2. Dump whatever’s in your twitter client logs to a file and write three lines of python to parse it into a form the bayesian filter can work with
  3. Train the filter and see what happens

Compared to the original approach it looks awesome, right? So what stops us approaching all projects like this? Well, there’s something beguiling about wanting to get the framework right from the start this time. It’s more comfortable starting with something we already know how to solve. Sometimes we have a clear vision of how it should end up in our heads and simply start to create that vision from the beginning through to the end.

Start in the middle.

— Paul Graham (lightly paraphrased)

Lean startups and the Minimum Viable Product are all about starting in the middle. Paul Graham’s advice for startups can be summed up as ‘first solve the interesting part of the problem, then build the business around it’, but the process is also fractal — starting in the middle applies right down to the level of writing a new class, or a single function. First write some code that solves the problem even if it’s imperfect or partial, then expand it out with your favourite blend of accessors, inheritance and polymorphism (Note: don’t even bother with that bit unless you hate yourself).

Comments

  1. Having once written an OpenID client, I totally agree.

Leave a Reply