I learned long ago that every interesting project, almost without fail, is terrifying at the beginning -- that's what makes it interesting. I look at it and go, "That's impossible; I have no idea what I'm doing; ahhhhh!"
So I start reading, studying, taking notes and writing outlines -- initially high-level, slowly getting more detailed. Iterate, iterate, iterate, getting deeper as I go, until finally, after a while, I look at it again and go, "Oh. Huh. That's fairly easy." And that is when I start coding.
That doesn't mean I understand it completely -- I always learn more as I code, and sometimes find out that I was wrong about the "easy" part. But it pretty consistently works to get me over my programmer's block.
no subject
Yeah, it's kind of similar in my world.
I learned long ago that every interesting project, almost without fail, is terrifying at the beginning -- that's what makes it interesting. I look at it and go, "That's impossible; I have no idea what I'm doing; ahhhhh!"
So I start reading, studying, taking notes and writing outlines -- initially high-level, slowly getting more detailed. Iterate, iterate, iterate, getting deeper as I go, until finally, after a while, I look at it again and go, "Oh. Huh. That's fairly easy." And that is when I start coding.
That doesn't mean I understand it completely -- I always learn more as I code, and sometimes find out that I was wrong about the "easy" part. But it pretty consistently works to get me over my programmer's block.