<story><title>How to build quickly</title><url>https://learnhowtolearn.org/how-to-build-extremely-quickly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>allenu</author><text>This is how I work on my projects as an indie dev. When I start working on something significant (a new feature, for instance), I&amp;#x27;ll create a markdown file that has a summary of what I&amp;#x27;m trying to achieve and then a TODOs section which turns into this massive outline of all the tasks that I&amp;#x27;ll need to do to complete the work.&lt;p&gt;At first, the outline just has a few tasks that are fairly high-level, but as I dive into each one, I add more nested sub-tasks. The nesting keeps going until I end up with sort of leaf nodes that can be done without depending on other tasks. This gives me a nice visual of how complex some tasks are versus others.&lt;p&gt;I generally prototype and design the implementation at the same time, and having this outline gives me a place to &amp;quot;dump&amp;quot; tasks and other work I&amp;#x27;ll need to do later, and you do often encounter more work than you expect, so an outline makes it easier to find a good &amp;quot;parent&amp;quot; for the task. Having a big outline also lets me jump around from high-level design to low-level implementation easily as well, which you need if you&amp;#x27;re prototyping and trying to find the right shape for your solution.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s great as a motivator too since I can see when I complete something big when I check off a parent task that has a lot of nested children.&lt;p&gt;I find a simple text file outline like this is so much more convenient than say an app or a web UI since I can just jump around the file and cut and paste outlined sections and indent or un-indent them to re-parent them. (Having to use something like JIRA to do this would be way too slow, especially when you&amp;#x27;re in a flow state.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darkteflon</author><text>Same here. I wrote a little multitree-based TUI with vim-adjacent key bindings for exactly this purpose, since I find it generalises to all complex projects, software-related or not (and who can resist any excuse to write a TUI?), but a simple markdown file is just as good, really, and for software means you can keep it in the repo directly adjacent to other project docs.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to build quickly</title><url>https://learnhowtolearn.org/how-to-build-extremely-quickly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>allenu</author><text>This is how I work on my projects as an indie dev. When I start working on something significant (a new feature, for instance), I&amp;#x27;ll create a markdown file that has a summary of what I&amp;#x27;m trying to achieve and then a TODOs section which turns into this massive outline of all the tasks that I&amp;#x27;ll need to do to complete the work.&lt;p&gt;At first, the outline just has a few tasks that are fairly high-level, but as I dive into each one, I add more nested sub-tasks. The nesting keeps going until I end up with sort of leaf nodes that can be done without depending on other tasks. This gives me a nice visual of how complex some tasks are versus others.&lt;p&gt;I generally prototype and design the implementation at the same time, and having this outline gives me a place to &amp;quot;dump&amp;quot; tasks and other work I&amp;#x27;ll need to do later, and you do often encounter more work than you expect, so an outline makes it easier to find a good &amp;quot;parent&amp;quot; for the task. Having a big outline also lets me jump around from high-level design to low-level implementation easily as well, which you need if you&amp;#x27;re prototyping and trying to find the right shape for your solution.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s great as a motivator too since I can see when I complete something big when I check off a parent task that has a lot of nested children.&lt;p&gt;I find a simple text file outline like this is so much more convenient than say an app or a web UI since I can just jump around the file and cut and paste outlined sections and indent or un-indent them to re-parent them. (Having to use something like JIRA to do this would be way too slow, especially when you&amp;#x27;re in a flow state.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ukuina</author><text>What do you do when an idea changes and now there are dozens of nested entries that need to be changed to match?</text></comment>