This week the quotes in my diary focus on starting. Something. Anything. A big project or a small activity. And the quote above is one that really appeals to me. The project that I've been working on at work started out as this seemingly massive thing where the amount of work we had to do and the time it was going to take us seemed like a stretch. But here we are, 9 months after starting development work and we're putting the finishing touches on the software and getting ready for the software to be used in a production environment (ie with real-life people and real-life situations).
I think this is one of the benefits of the way that engineers are taught to think. We break a big, complex, impossible-sounding problem down into smaller manageable steps. This approach to problem solving allows us to achieve the seemingly impossible.
If you can break an impossible task down into a bunch of completely possible pieces and you complete all the possible pieces successfully then, surely your impossible task just became possible by virtue of completing all the smaller possible pieces... Try this approach next time you have to solve a problem and see if it helps!
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Deleteery true my fellow programmer!
ReplyDeleteThe simplified terminology I like to use to describe this is "Divide and conquer"... seems to have a motivational flare to it ;)
Haha, yes indeed! And in a similar line of thought - “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler” - Einstein...which is a surprisingly complicated thing to do, considering the goal is simplicity :D
DeleteNext time you're back in SA let me know, would be great to catch up, try round up a crew from varsity :)