Ask HN: What does your project research and planning process look like?

If your motivation is to build something functional but also to learn something new - to get the most out of the whole endeavor - you probably don’t want to be doing the same thing for decades, but rather to keep learning and experimenting with new ideas and technologies.

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?