Developer's block

Sleep. Best side task for your brain.

How many times has this happened to me?

You struggle with a feature or a bug, you think about it, you weigh the pros and cons for hours... because you don't want to start something that will set you back. You're tired, but you don't want to go to sleep until you've at least made a decision for tomorrow.

Go to sleep. Now.

Then you wake up knowing immediately what to do. You hardly believe it, because it was so hard to find before you sleep. And you do it. And it works. And you know that sleep was the key.

> A new project and it’s going to be your best ever

A good defense against this is borrowing stuff from your prior projects, alongside eventually creating templates for the most common stuff.

For example, in new side projects I start, I can borrow the web server (ingress) configuration from the prior ones, same for CI pipelines and a large part of the previous Dockerfiles, sometimes even entire services with all of the annoying setup and configuration stuff already done.

Plus, this way, you have a more or less working baseline and further iteration is entirely up to you - and if you do want to improve things a bunch, then the next time your template will be even better and you'll be able to backport whatever you think everything should have to your other projects as well.

Going with the simplest solutions along the way helps: Bash scripts for triggering builds, CI configuration just calling those, using Docker or similar containers for the environments and builds, your ingress just being Nginx/Caddy/Apache2/..., using PostgreSQL or SQLite and specialized stuff like Redis/Valkey, RabbitMQ, MinIO and so on instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes it's also useful to write utility scripts and even small tools to help with the projects, I bet developers that have been around for decades and are way better than I am have a lot of that stuff, alongside a healthy helping of dotfiles for existing tools to get in the zone while doing the dev work. Although it can also be helpful to go the YAGNI route and customize things as little as possible, like a stock IDE install, not even bothering with the color themes or keybinds or a plethora of plugins - just install and go.

> Release early, release often

I’m big on this.

I find it efficacious to have an integrated product going as soon as possible, even if it’s a field of stubs.

It’s my experience that I almost never know what the end product will look like, no matter how much upfront planning time I devote, so being able to test and iterate the whole system, as soon as possible, is pretty vital.

It’s also one reason that I like to use test harnesses a lot[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/

If I’ve had a break, gone for a walk, left it overnight, worked on something else simple for a bit and tried the other usual ‘fixes’ and am still stuck then I find ‘just do it’ really helps me. I find if I just write some code even slightly related to the goal, even if it’s complete garbage that gets deleted later, then I get unstuck. Although unfortunately even getting to that point takes a couple of days sometimes. We can’t always perform immediately on demand.

Of all the uses of LLMs, this is the most useful to me. Being able to force a minor draft that I can begin tweaking to overcome dev or writers block.

Besides mentioned by others walks and sleep I found meditation to be really helpful; you often can get the benefits, ideas-generation-wise, of a full-night sleep doing solid 30-minute session. There are other benefits of meditating too :)

Perhaps switch languages/paradigms for a few days. If you are used to using "text-based" languages such as golang, python, c++ or java, try something like Smalltalk to freshen you up. Pharo https://pharo.org/ is a nice implementation.

I can feel this block, especially when I'm starting a new project.

Two things that help me:

* have a good boilerplate

* ship things that do nothing

i.e. I find it helps to start a project using my good boilerplate then set up builds and releases (so for web projects, put them online) so that the page doesn't look so blank anymore, and I can see my progress in "releases" even if they're just for me/others contributing.

There's so much good advice in this article. My number one point that i learned the hard way during two decades of writing software: take breaks when your body tells you to. It's an absolute killer if you force yourself to work on your projects just because there's stuff on your to do list, new issues on Github, or whatever. Just stop working if you don't feel it.

When faced with a big task and not knowing where and how to start, a trick I like is writing something crappy that is roughly a step in the right direction. For example, if you're building a web browser (huge monumental task), just load a page with your favorite http lib and display it, html tags and all. You know that none of that code will survive, but it's something that you can build on, and in due time you'll come around and replace it with the right design.

Great advice all round.

> Take time with learning

But this one in particular stands out. We are being constantly pushed to ship code at faster and faster rates. AI has only hastened the process.

If you want to learn anything new you have to slow it down, push back against all the forces urging you to do more, ship more, make more money.

If you're using AI tools, do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. For every piece of generated code you accept, scrutinize every line, ask clarifying questions, ask for alternate implementations, ask what the tradeoffs are.

Just be curious.

This will be slow, but that's the point.

I’ve also found that LLMs are great for getting past developer’s block. “What next?” can overcome inertia quite easily.