Hacker and agile development

Hacker and agile development

Some time ago, I read Paul Graham's hackers and painters: big ideas from the computer age. Although this book has been published for a long time, however, reading is often time-free, and it is good to get the harvest. This book is a collection of contents, which are scattered and not targeted at people in the industry. Therefore, different people can tell this book from different perspectives. But in any case, I think the vast majority of people can get a lot from this book. I am from the IT industry and only talk about my understanding from the perspective of IT entrepreneurs.

"If you observe those who make great works, you will find that what they have in common is that they work very hard. If you do not work hard, you may be wasting time. Not all pain points are beneficial. There are beneficial and beneficial pains in the world. What you need is the pain of your teeth sprinting forward, not the pain of shoes. The pain of solving problems is good for designers, but it is another thing to deal with the pain of discerning customers or the pain of dealing with poor quality building materials. "

The hard work of entrepreneurship is inevitable, but it is not just a hard work to succeed.Hard work should be spent in the sprint to the target, and in the game with the opponent, rather than unnecessary consumption. This is also consistent with Hacker's consistent pursuit (hacker in this article is consistent with the hacker in the book, all of which refer to geekers in pursuit ). For the start-up process, after setting the basic conditions required to carry out the business, concentrate on your main business. In the main business, we also need to focus on one or two breakthroughs, rather than being dispersed by other things.

So what are the points of attention in this process?

First, we need to understand that "entrepreneurship has always had a potential rule:Once you start a business, many things cannot help you.Before you start a business, you only need to work two to three times to get the corresponding return. However, after you start a business, your competitors decide how hard your business will be. The decisions they make are the same: how much bitter you can eat, how much bitter we can eat, so entrepreneurs will be very hard. In this case, you should go beyond the hierarchy above your environment. Otherwise, you are bound to be tired. "So what we need to do is to compete with our competitors by going beyond the opponent's level and realm. The competition process is divided into two levels: strategy and tactics. The two are mutually compatible and indispensable. In terms of strategy, we need to start from the product itself, positioning, and core functions. We need to stand better than our competitors and look far behind our competitors. To do this, we need to pay attention to two aspects: first, we need to establish the original intention of solving the problem rather than to show the technology, and second, we should not blindly think that we are far behind others' ideas, instead, it needs to be adjusted through a large number of verifications. To support a large number of adjustments, agile thinking is essential. In terms of tactics, we must consider whether the implementation of every detail is appropriate. Specifically for it startups, this tactic is inseparable from programming. The program-related content will be discussed below.

Second, we also need to understand that "when people really notice you, they don't see you standing there at the first glance, but discover that you have been there for so long ."Sometimes it is not that you are not beautiful, but that your beauty has not bloomed for too long.The importance of persistence does not need to be repeated, but it is an artistic activity to grasp the critical points of persistence and flexibility.

Third,"The best way to get rich is to create wealth (not plunder)". As long as wealth can be created, wealth can be obtained. However, the persistence of wealth is questionable if wealth is stolen. "To better create wealth, what you do requires two guarantees: measurable and magnified. The know-how in Silicon Valley comes from small teams, and the scalability comes from developing new technologies ." The ability to create wealth by measuring small teams and developing new technologies to truly create wealth is undoubtedly the core competitiveness of small teams.

Now let's go back to the entrepreneurial tactics. For it startups, the specific tactics are very close to programming. In order to be fast and efficient than competitors in tactics, it is a good idea to select a very agile language. In this book, I highly recommend LISP to write programs efficiently. In this regard, I partially agree.The concept of LISP Language is undoubtedly a model of programming language. However, it may not be very efficient to directly use lisp for specific development processes.First, the number of programmers who have mastered the lisp language is relatively small. If you have not mastered lisp, but lisp for the sake of lisp, it has not accumulated for several years, it is likely to be "only a sword without a corresponding sword", so whether to use lisp depends on the situation. Second, it is undeniable that currently the library of lisp is not rich enough, but there is also a solution to this problem, that is, using the Java class library clojure. This is why I think clojure is better than Common LISP and scheme. The third reason is that the lisp programmers are too small to be able to expand. Even clojure is widely used in China. My point is, why not try Ruby? Of course, this article is not a matter of language. The above points are just a simple comments of the monks. If you do not agree with them, please criticize and correct them.

It should be said that hacker and painter is still worth reading. I believe you will have a new understanding and experience after reading it. Finally, I want to end the article with a sentence in hacker and painter: "The painting will never be finished for a day, but you will not draw any more. "Our Life is painting.