But in software development, the most valuable skills you learn are not those you pick up when throwing a quick CRUD app together, but those you learn when debugging, refactoring and optimising legacy code.
I see too many junior devs get frustrated with something, throw it away, only to rebuild it with very similar problems because they didn't really understand the root cause in the first place.
If you are saying you can (and should) fix code but cannot fix, for example, a joke. I disagree.
Only once you know what the problem is can you decide if it makes more sense to start over.
This alone has made me way better at structuring databases for queries, planning properly, etc. My day job is more of a data science role and it's helped a ton to know how to build the whole stack.
1. Spend some tiny amount of time building the simplest thing that represents your idea on an artboard. The focus here is to function as a first step, not to strive for perfection.
2. Identify one thing to change (shapes, colours, font, etc).
3. Duplicate the whole artboard, and tweak that one thing on the copy.
4. GOTO 2. Keep looking back at previous artboards and don't be afraid to revert if you notice that you've been off course for the past few iterations. Never delete an artboard, just go back and fork.
5. Stop when there's nothing immediately obvious to tweak.
It's a simple workflow that produces much better results than endlessly tweaking a single artboard, and you can see your evolution over time, so it's easier to identify the things that work / don't work to improve your skills the next time around.
FWIW though, Github's image diff is quite useful in this regard. They have a number of useful comparison interfaces for image files that may fit your needs.
And here I am rewriting my frontend for the 7th time.
This is actually standard practice in the UK comedy scene. A lot of people are focused on creating a new show for the Edinburgh Festival every year, and spend 9 months a year workshopping their new material in standup clubs aiming towards having a polished hour every August.
Previous generations of comedians would do the same material over years...Cosby was the last of that generation.
>I think our biggest strength is that we have a show that we completely make in one building in six days, and then we’re on to the next one.
It's a particular approach for something creative, and also in the spirit of innovation. I like how they just flat-out seem to admit they get bored easily, are confident in their past work (e.g. "We already did that episode"), but still never count on the future.
>“O.K., well, this isn’t gonna last. Any minute now we’re gonna get run out of town.”
In the entertainment industry, I have no doubt this is the proper mentality to have, because when successful, it simply means that it doesn't happen. Lose the audience/ad revenue, lose the network/label/studio support, lose the parking spot!
Probably more because they didn't know how preposterous that was than as a desire to create a new paradigm.
And so, when their first album came out, they already had most of the songs for the next three albums written.
He talks about how he got good at standup after 15 years of doing the same thing. He threw away all his material (material he'd been working on for 15 years) and just started trying different things. Then he started throwing away his material every year and creating new material. He noticed that he got better and better by doing this.
This also reminded me of another anecdote I'd heard somewhere where you have a pottery class with 20 students.
The class was split: 10 students would make a new sculpture every day while the other 10 would have to produce only 1 sculpture for the class (which of course would represent all the extra planning and execution that went into the solo sculpture). At the end of the quarter, the 10 people who made something new every day and then threw it away were far better at sculpting, while everyone in the other group made something kind of shitty and spent a lot of time doing it.
So maybe it's not "lack of planning" quite so much as willingness to kill your darlings, again and again.