Early work tends to not be very visible and that makes seeing tangible results seem difficult. For example, if I chose to work on VT parsing for my terminal, I can't see it work without also hooking up a UI of some sort. Or for some other project if I chose to work on a database schema and minimal API, I similarly can't see that work without... See more

In building Sublime, I've found myself getting distracted by shiny feature syndrome so much that I realized it'd be helpful to explicitly lay out what actual problems I was trying to solve for myself.