In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Richard Hamming

We could divide our time making software into learning what we need to make, and making and running it. If you know what you need to build then you can stop talking about it and build it. If you don’t know what you are building you should not be building it.

In the book the above quote is from the author makes the point that nothing is ever that purely divided. This is why we have concepts like MVPs and spikes. They are the science piece of learning what we don’t know and trying out ideas to see how they work in practise. Once we’ve done the learning then we can implement what we’ve learned with higher confidence it’s going to be what we need.

Could you divide the work you have coming up into work where you know what you are doing and work where you don’t?