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 articles with relatively scattered contents. It is not intended for people in the industry, so 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 look at those who make great works, you will find that what they have in common is hard work. Assuming that you are not hard at work, you may be wasting time. Not all the pain points are intentional. There are deliberate and beneficial pains in the world. What you need is the pain of biting your teeth, not the pain of sticking a nail on your feet. The pain of solving problems has advantages for designers, but there is still one thing to deal with the pain of discerning customers or the pain of dealing with poor quality building materials. "

The hard work of starting a business is inevitable, but it is not just a matter of hard work that can succeed.Hard work should be spent in the sprint to the target, playing 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 up the main 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 make it clear 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 want to work two to three times to get the corresponding return. But after you start a business, your competitors decide how hard you really want to work. The decisions they make are the same: how much you can eat, how much 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 competitor's level and position. 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 to solve this problem rather than to show the technology, and second, we should not blindly think that we are far behind others' ideas, it needs to be adjusted through a lot of verification, and agile thinking is indispensable to support a lot of adjustments. In terms of tactics, we must consider whether the implementation of each detail is appropriate. This tactic is inseparable from programming if it is used to start a business. The content related to program writing should be discussed below.

Second, we also need to make it clear 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 you are not beautiful for a long time.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 rich (not plunder)". You only need to be able to create rich, then you can get rich. However, the persistence of the rich is questionable if the rich are under attack. "To better create wealth, you need two guarantees: scalability and scalability. Silicon Valley's know-how is that the scalability comes from small teams, and the scalability comes from developing new technologies ." However, the ability to create rich talent for small teams and to develop new technologies to truly create rich talent are undoubtedly the core competitiveness of small teams.

Now we are back to the issue of entrepreneurial tactics. For it startups, the detailed tactics are very close to programming. In order to be more efficient than competitors in tactics, it is a good idea to choose a very agile language. In this book, I highly recommend LISP to write programs efficiently. In this regard, I would like to allow some comments.The concept of the lisp language is undoubtedly a model of today's programming languages. However, using lisp directly for detailed development processes may not be very efficient.First, there are quite a few programmers who have mastered the lisp language. Suppose you have not mastered lisp, but lisp for the sake of lisp, and you have not accumulated many years, it is likely to become "only a sword with no corresponding skill", so whether to use lisp depends on the situation. Second, it is undeniable that 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 program is too small and it is really easy 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 of view are just a simple comments of the monks. If the readers 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 would like to end the article with a sentence in hacker and painter: "The painting will never be finished in a day, and you just will not draw any more. "Our Life is painting.

Hacker and agile development