This sentence resonates with me: "After a few failed attempts, I realised that Pageant would never get released at all if I waited until I’d drawn the icon I wanted". Many of the projects I'd like to tinker with stop at such self-inflicted roadblocks. My favorite is getting stuck at naming the repository/top-level folder.
One of the areas LLMs has been most helpful to me personally has to be getting over naming choices lol, whether it's repos, variables or structs for some reason I tend to have a hard time coming up with names :').
I started trying to draw an icon for an app I'm working on. Curves in SVG are hard, yo. I ended up with a much simpler logo that makes more sense than the one I meant to make.
Isn't bike-shedding when other people block you with low-effort critisism.
"""
Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and
get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar
atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will
be tangled up in endless discussions.
Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast,
so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and
rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody
else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P.
Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point,
examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.
A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over
a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no
matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with
your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is
doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.
"""
Yak-shaving comes to mind, but that is more when you have a large boring project you have to get through first in order to get to the interesting parts.
It's not usually icons for me. It's some really repetitive part of the project that puts me off, and I figure out some way to code around it, but doing so is not rewarding enough, or I hit some dopamine threshold where I've 'solved' the problem enough that I'm satisfied with the mental exercise alone.
Bike shedding in Parkinson's description is paradoxically putting more thought on things that are easy to comprehend than things that are hard to grasp.
Yak shaving is having to do something seemingly unrelated to your project before you can make progress on more evidently related issues.
