Expectation as Comparison
While writing the word expectation I always remember an old interactive installation I was involved with back in my freelance days, comparing an asset’s value in a couple of years to show that the value of things tend to change or the value of money also tend to change. Knowing the expectation hopefully help in making a more informed decision, and knowing how the expectation differ from reality can help in calibrating future expectation.
Why am I talking about that in the first place?
I’ve just got slapped in the face with my mindset of just do and ship, maybe at the baseline it’s a good mindset, but taken to an aggressive extreme it can be painful and reckless. I’m forced to reflect on myself for a moment, and one thing that I could actively do in the future is:
Explicitly state my expectation before executing the just do/ship mindset
Hopefully this will be a scaffold to make sure that all things at least work as expected in my mind, or if I’m not even clear what to expect then it should act as a signal to refine what I’m creating or split things up to make things less complex.
Also, having expectation will act as a reflection on what I really want to test in the future. The harder I put my expectation in a concise and non-roundabout manner, the more I need to write test on it to make sure I really understand it.
Welp, I guess this kind of things signal that I have a lot more rooms to improve? hopefully I won’t repeat the same things in the future.