When Plans don't Last

I'm pretty new to things. I'm a college student who, unfortunately, is still lacking in real-world experience. From personal branding to creating web applications, I find myself trying to plan far into the future. I want what I do now to be sustainable as things change, and scalable as things get bigger.

However, I keep finding that the plans I invested in not too long ago need change. The work I did before seems to be for naught.

My mess-ups

Working on my own personal branding has unearthed problems. Small things, they add up. I wish I used my full name on this media platform, or I wish I had published that project under this link. I've missed the opportunity to streamline how people get to know me by staying under one familiar name.

When I started all those accounts, I thought I was thinking about the future. My planning wasn't thorough.

Productivity

import marshmallow
import pydantic
import graphene

The biggest personal project I've worked on is CourseCake.

I thought I had read up enough about Flask, knew enough about python to go ahead with the project and not expect major rewrites. In each rewrite I made, I tried to plan better. But I still found myself making huge changes -- whether it be for better user interaction or scalability, I believed in my head that this was the last change.

This led me to a question: Is excessive planning bad for productivity? The time I've spent rewriting could have gone towards building cool, useful, new features.

I'm learning that I'm learning

I find myself asking the wrong question. It's not Planning vs Productivity, it's me vs The Problem.

The big thing about me is that my mind is small -- I don't know enough. I make mistakes that are costly, but that's learning. These mistakes I made aren't so much about planning, but not knowing enough. They could have been avoided had I taken the time to explore new things and networked with the right people.

So yeah, I hope that as I gain experience, my plans will become more sturdy.

Peace with Uncertainty

As a programmer, I want to be able to anticipate all the problems. I want to write all the test cases I can with 100% coverage. This COVID-19 season has taught me there are just things you can't anticipate -- you need to be willing to change.

This is the part that is beyond development. I don't like the fact that the plans I made of where I'd be today were so far off the reality. And I don't like the possibility that my plans can fall through again. But this is the reality, and in the scope of things, I'm doing ok.

Not sure how this is for a first blog post, but I want to push my thought processes out there, even if it's only for my own processing.

Peace be with you~