What does your process of digging through the internet, searching for and analyzing similar existing projects and solutions, gathering information, considering alternatives, and making reasonable trade-offs look like?
This process begins long before a single line of code is written, continues throughout the development phase, and doesn’t stop even after you have a working version. Skipping serious analysis of existing solutions regularly leads to reinventing the wheel.
This is actually the hardest and most important part of the work — bringing order to chaos, separating the signal from the noise, to ultimately produce something concrete and useful. When the research phase is done well, implementation becomes a quick and straightforward task.
What are your go-to research and planning routines and strategies for success, and also what are the common mistakes and pitfalls in this process that you or others often repeat?