kurokikaze comments on The True Rejection Challenge - Less Wrong
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Procrastination is making me miss a lot of opportunities. Up to and including (in progress): having a chance at anchoring myself in a first-world country vs blowing it and having to return to eastern Europe.
Barriers:
High initial anxiety when sitting down to start a project. Related to #2.
Low confidence in own abilities after so many mediocre last-minute solutions in the past.
No social support - no friends interested in programming.
Additional anxiety due to being behind schedule with 3-4 items - article, internship work, internship report, learning a framework to try and get a job at company I'm interning at. Also, haven't made proper Plan B, C arrangements in case I don't get the job (again due to anxiety).
It's this annoying vicious circle of anxiety and procrastination I can't seem to get out of. Any takers? PJ Eby's comments on akrasia were interesting, but we go back to the issue of bootstrapping enough motivation/confidence to do the actions required to get the ball rolling.
1, 2, 3 - You can get into opensource social coding like Github or Bitbucket. This will improve your coding skills and make you some coder friends to help with tough questions (worked for me). Time constraint is harder to deal with.
Would you mind expanding on this a little? These websites look like version control / project management systems, how does one jump into the "public" projects you're talking about?
It's simple. I'll show on one example.
I was interested in Sphinx search server, so I've decided to do its protocol implementation in javascript (for node.js).
I've created project on github and got remote URL. Then I've created folder on local disk and started coding. Reverse-enginereed PHP Sphinx connector, written some JS code, commited it to local Git repo. Next step: add remote URL to git repo. After this I can push my changes to Github with "git push remote master", where "master" is the branch name. And voila, project is on the Github.
Then I write some more code and get first working prototype. I announced it in node.js Google group to attract another developers to project. They watch, comment on commits (not often) and send pull requests for code via Github (more often). Then I decide if I need the patch and apply / modify+apply / decline patch. Someone can fork my project if they feel I won't add some feature they need or I'm too lazy updating the code.
Basically, that's it.
Awesome, thanks :)