Here I am, trying to write something. I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my screen an it looks like this:

It is empty. I just have no clue how to even start.

Are you familiar with such situations? Among writers, this is a well-known phenomenon and it’s called “writer’s block”. But similar things happen in all creative fields: sooner or later, people hit a massive roadblock and don’t know where to start. A painter sits in front of a blank canvas, an engineer in front of a blank piece of paper and a programmer in front of an empty editor buffer.

Is there any help? Sure. You can use a technique called “free writing“, which means you just write down whatever comes to your mind, regardless of how silly it looks. It’s important that you don’t judge what you write, you don’t pay attention to spelling or layout, your only job is to produce a constant stream of words — any words. This exercise will warm-up your brains and hopefully remove the block. Applied to programming, you set up a project, you write a “main” routine (even if it only prints out “Hello, World, I don’t know how to implement this freaking application”) and a test driver that invokes it.

The next thing that you do is write a “shitty first draft“, as suggested by Anne Lamott. You probably know the old saying: the better is the enemy of the good. By looking for the perfect solution, we often end up achieving nothing because we cannot accept temporary uncertainty and ugliness. That’s really, really sad. Instead, write a first draft, even if it is a lousy one. Then, put it aside and let it mature, but make sure you revisit it regularly. You will be amazed at how new ideas and insights emerge. Experienced programmers are familiar with this idea, but they call it prototyping. They jot down code, they smear and sketch without paying attention to things like style and error-handling, often in a dynamic language like Perl or Python.

So if you have an idea that you think is worthwhile implementing, start it. Start somewhere — anywhere — even if the overall task seems huge. Get into ‘insert’ mode (if you are using the ‘vi’ editor, press the ‘I’ key). Remember the Chinese proverb: “The hardest part of a journey of a thousand miles is leaving your house”.