The Cult of Done Manifesto

The Cult of Done Manifesto

- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

- There is no editing stage.

- Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing,
   so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

- Once you're done you can throw it away.

- Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.

- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

- Destruction is a variant of done.

- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

- Done is the engine of more.

        http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html?v=1

--
Marcus Denker  -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

Cool, both posters are nice as well, especially the graphical one with the Rubik's Cubes.

On 18 May 2011, at 13:17, Marcus Denker wrote:

excellent.
So I guess that we can interpret it as a call to the community to get even more in doing mode :)
I love that message.
Get expert by doing :)
Stef

On May 18, 2011, at 1:17 PM, Marcus Denker wrote:

Thanks marcus for pointing this.

Noury
On 18 mai 2011, at 13:17, Marcus Denker wrote:

Noury Bouraqadi
http://car.mines-douai.fr/noury
--
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22-26 August 2011, Edinburgh, UK
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17-19 Octobre 2011, Valenciennes, France

Statements like "just pretend you know what you're doing" should raise
red flags because it leads to "doing anything at all, even it is bad, is
good".  One might as well forget trying to know in favor of pretending
to know, because doing something (anything) makes you right.  But of
course, no amount of pretense will make software work when it's critical
for it to work at a customer's site, or when doing a demo of your
research work while defending your thesis.  Not only that, but doing
something any which way has the hidden cost of incurring into software
debt.  Exactly how much cleanup homework are we still dealing with
because of that kind of attitude?  Are we happy with the results?
Things that Work(TM) don't happen by accident, they are the product of
significant amounts of effort.  Shoddy code that appears to work some of
the time is Just Bad(TM), and sooner or later you pay for it ***with
interest***.

On 5/18/11 4:17 , Marcus Denker wrote:

On 21 May 2011 02:40, Andres Valloud <[hidden email]> wrote:
Agreed. There is a big difference between "do something" and "do it right".

But at same time, sometimes, you have to do something first and only
then you will know how to do it right.
Software development is iterative process.

--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

> Agreed. There is a big difference between "do something" and "do it right".
>
> But at same time, sometimes, you have to do something first and only
> then you will know how to do it right.
> Software development is iterative process.

I support the idea of putting effort into doing things, as opposed to
merely discussing doing things for the sake of discussion.  I also think
it's important to have a good definition of what "done" means :).  I
wish the manifesto would emphasize that sometimes it's hard to get
"done" no matter what you do, and that there are cases in which pretense
doesn't cut it.  Essentially I think we're on the same page, though.

Andres.

CONTENTS DELETED

Am 21.05.2011 um 02:40 schrieb Andres Valloud:

> Statements like "just pretend you know what you're doing" should raise red flags because it leads to "doing anything at all, even it is bad, is good".  One might as well forget trying to know in favor of pretending to know, because doing something (anything) makes you right.  But of course, no amount of pretense will make software work when it's critical for it to work at a customer's site, or when doing a demo of your research work while defending your thesis.  Not only that, but doing something any which way has the hidden cost of incurring into software debt.  Exactly how much cleanup homework are we still dealing with because of that kind of attitude?  Are we happy with the results? Things that Work(TM) don't happen by accident, they are the product of significant amounts of effort.  Shoddy code that appears to work some of the time is Just Bad(TM), and sooner or later you pay for it ***with interest***.
>
I don't read an imperative in that rule that you should pretend. I read it in a way that "not knowing it exactly" shouldn't keep you from doing things. There is no apriori experience. So we often don't know exactly what we do but we learn it while doing it. You might think you know what you are doing and you will learn a lot while you are doing it. At the end you will look back to the point when you started and what you think might by that you were some kind of pretending at the beginning. We are as incremental in learning as our software is in being created.

IMHO the term "doing it right" is omnipresent in software development and often leads in the wrong direction. I think I suffered more from that so far as from pretending colleagues.

my 2 cents,

Norbert