Fighting the urge to switch projects during coding? [closed]

Question

I am 22 Years of age and have been into computers since 13 and programming for the past 3 yrs. I am in the CSE program in my local university. I have been thinking non-stop about startup ideas and open-source contribution projects, but i find it very hard to stick to the program. I start to code, then as am coding i stop and think about something new which i think might be a great idea. Is this normal for programmers. If not how can i fight this?

Answer 1

I often have this myself. You start working on a project, enthousiastic, passionate, full of great ideas, and then slowly, as you progress, you start longing for something else, want to do a new project, etcetera.

In my opinion it is normal. And I think there are good explanations:

• Most of it has to do with the classic '80%-20%' rule (Pareto Principle), which I think applies here as well. You design this great architecture, start coding, everything seems to come together great, you're proud, you feel you have achieved great things and then.... comes the boring stuff. You've done the fun stuff, now you have to fix bugs, do minor changes, there's little architectural challenge left, and the worse part is: you might've done 80% of the project, but the other 20% (the boring stuff) will still take 80% of your total time. It's depressing. Please, give me something new!
• One other reason I can think of is that in your head, your little software program is always so much cooler then it turns out to be. You think you've come up with this great architecture, incredibly cool user interface - you name it, and it all turns out to be just another piece of software.

I don't think you're alone on this one. And though writing a 'To Do' list can somewhat help (like some others mentioned) it does not always get rid of that feeling :-)