Comment by dgb23

I'm _exactly_ in this situation right now with a side project.

It's in a field that I have little experience with (Information Retrieval). So there is obviously prior art that I could learn from or even integrate with.

This article motivates me further to learn things by focusing on building my own and peek into prior art as I go, when I'm stuck or need ideas.

Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time.

However, he also mentioned that he made other languages before. So the larger story starts earlier, by making things and learning from practice.

Maybe that's also the bigger lesson: Don't overthink, start by making the thing. But later when you learned a bunch of practical lessons and maybe hit a wall or two, then you might need that deeper research to push further.