

Early drafts of great work are encouraging - sivers
http://sivers.org/early

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yan
I also love seeing code repositories in early version. Seeing a code base grow
and become polished is encouraging, especially looking at a mess of functions
in the first few days of my projects.

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sharpn
_If you like great poetry_ check out the drafts of Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for
a Doomed Youth' - Sigfreid Sassoon helped him redraft it into possibly the
most iconic WW1 poem, but the original version was relatively weak.
Fascinating to see the changes, for example:
[http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic1b/2ant...](http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic1b/2anthem.htm)

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10ren
I agree growing things is the way to go, and it's worked for me. Mistakes in
some areas are harder to fix, such as in public APIs that others rely on - but
they still _can_ be fixed by deprecating older approaches. It's painful; but
perhaps even worse to keep delaying til it's perfect...

A hard one is patents: you can't patent after launching, selling or even
demoing it publicly, so you have to finalize the design well-enough to
describe it in detail, without the benefit of experience with actual users.

You can file a provisional application beforehand, but it has to be as
complete as a full application, because you can't add materially to it. I
Believe that in the USA, you can apply up to a year after inventing it, but
you'll still need sufficiently good documentation to be able to prove that the
invention date, if challenged. A meticulously kept notebook is probably
sufficient.

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grandalf
This is a superb point. I recall the first time I went to a museum and saw
pencil "studies" of famous works of art... it really brings the whole process
of art down to earth and you realize it's a simple, creative but iterative
process, much like software engineering.

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mkn
Karma be damned! Video in article is best watched while drunk.

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Confusion
As I commented when the link to pg writing his essay, that this story cites as
an example, was submitted to Reddit:

 _I think it [is] rather encouraging to would-be writers to see that someone
that is [..] succesful rewrites his sentences many times. It can be quite
disheartening to find it necessary to rewrite the same bit over and over
again, if you suffer from the illusion that good writers pen down everything
in one go._

