I found this link today in my blog reading: Just Barely Enough Design. It goes through the idea of starting small instead of trying to undertake something huge.
To this day, I am sorely tempted to undertake the whole grand dramatic turn-the-world-upside-down vision…or nothing at all. The trouble is more often than not you end up with exactly…nothing at all.
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This is one of the (recurring) lessons from the dotcom days I’ve beat into my head the hard way (yup, way over-planned, over-designed, over-architected and flopped – and that’s how I finally got to be a big devotee of agile software development).
It also quotes Linus Torvalds:
Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed.
The idea of starting small is one of the reasons why Game in a Day is so attractive. I know I won’t be making anything huge or general so I can concentrate on just doing it.