Creative tooling

A friend remarked the other day that if you want to make a lot of things, it's worth spending a lot of time on your tools. With my recent prototyping kick I've been noticing how often I seem to be repeating a fairly similar sequence of setup steps. I've been mostly messing around with shiny web technology things, so the setup mostly involves local webservers and Coffeescript build scripts, but each kind of project tends to have its own standard setup process.

It occurs to me that depending on the balance of new vs existing projects in your work, the total cost of setup would be vastly different. If you tend to work on multi-year-long ongoing projects, really any degree of setup cost is unlikely to matter. On the other hand, a 37signals-style web consultancy business will probably see multiple new projects a month. So it's important to keep that cost down. However, even that is a very different calculation compared to creating a new project each day, or even multiple per day.

It might sound excessive, but I actually think making multiple projects per day can actually be a pretty good way to do things. If you're looking for new ideas and trying a few different designs, or you want to write code in a highly decoupled (dare I say microservice) style, or you want to validate your assumptions with some throwaway code before you go all-in – all of these are great reasons to create new projects early and often.

But for that to make sense you really need your new project creation process to be really efficient. If it takes, say, 15 minutes I think that's still too long. Ideally it'd be under a minute from deciding to make a new project to being able to start meaningfully working on it. I'm nowhere near that point at the moment, but I think it could be feasible with the right set of creative tools.

I think the biggest improvement would be something like a palette of semi-reusable code chunks. When I find myself doing the same thing a few times in different projects I could drop a copy of that repeated code in the palette and then pull it out the next time I need it. I'd want to be able to do that at different scales – from single lines of code to whole files all the way up to multiple files spread across different directories.

There'd be a lot of tricky work involved to make something like that work well, but I think it'd be pretty useful. The less friction for creating a new project, the easier it is to create and the more experimental you can be.