The Burden of Knowledge: Why Experience Gets in the Way

The post was originally written for the Telegram channel.

Over the past 10 years I have made various pet/fan projects:

1. Extensions iNikolayev and kNurtas, which change pictures on the page in photographs by Igor Nikolaev or Kairat Nurtas;
2. Telegram bot for checking the balance on the card ONAY (disabled because the developers have closed access to the API for verification);
3. Telegram bot for quick (online) translation from Kazakh Cyrillic to Kazakh Latin;
4. Telegram bot for Almaty Bike (not working yet, because I am not an active user of the system);
5. Telegram channel with parsing new Kazakhstan domains;
6. Twitter bot with tenge exchange rate according to the National Bank;

There was probably something else that I no longer remember or the project did not leave a special mark.

And all these projects have one thing in common - I did them quickly, without particularly thinking about any architecture or further development of the projects, I remade them when I was in the mood or I learned something that could improve the project.

It was important for me to receive instant feedback from users or simply enjoy the development while learning something new (for example, Geospatial Queries requests in the Almaty Bike bot to get the stations closest to the user).

Now I have several projects spinning in my head, of varying degrees of elaboration and complexity, but something is stopping me from implementing them.

And I think this is what I call the "burden of knowledge" - I'm hampered by the knowledge I've gained over the last 11 years about how to develop and launch products.

I've seen enough of "good" approaches to development and now I can't start doing anything until I have a board in JIRA with all the tasks. Designs will not be stored in Figma. CI/CD is configured and debugged.

I think too much and don't start doing anything. Although, of course, it is necessary to think, you need not only to think, but also to try, otherwise you will not know what is behind the closed door.

I'm writing this post primarily to motivate myself to create something new, but I hope it will help you get in the right frame of mind too.