What is your work efficiency?

Question

Programming

"My whole life is an expanding cycle ***"

(c) Rust. About how, after the prospects of becoming a serious C ++ voodoo programmer, I had to write at night for 4 years in asma, and during the day work as an enikey worker under cover.

I've been working on a project remotely for a while and at first this approach was very effective. But for several months now, the work has been very difficult for me. You have to completely rewrite the once created project, because its architecture was not thought out at all. For several weeks I was designing and changing the code at the same time. I have little design experience, or better yet, none at all. In short, I stepped on all sorts of rakes and problems continue to this day. I get distracted a lot and all that.
Maybe the reason is work at home, maybe it's laziness, maybe fatigue (I've been sitting on the same task for several months and I can't solve it in any way). Or maybe for such a task it is normal if one person works? I thought that I need to clearly understand what my problem is, is it that I am inefficient or that I am trying to solve a problem that is too difficult for myself at this stage of development? How long would it take other people to do the same tasks? How to evaluate your effectiveness? Just compare yourself to others. Remote work is clearly bad for self-determination and introspection, which makes it difficult to work on mistakes.
Personally, I am especially sad not from the problems themselves (after all, I read about the same problems in cool books - McConnell, Brooks), but because the project does not seem difficult to me. It begins to seem to me that the task that normal programmers will do in an hour or two, I will do in a week or a month. In general terms, this application is a "photo booth" that will run locally on a PC and display the image of people on the 1st screen as if through a camera lens, take a picture after the countdown, display a tape of taken photos on the 2nd screen where people can view taken photos and send them to print. In addition, an important feature is cutting out the background and all sorts of color correction to fit the image onto another background. It is important that in the future the scenes can change and be supplemented, and all sorts of stickers can be added to the photo. It took me 2 months to complete the basic version of the program. work (with most of it fiddling with WPF, which was unfamiliar to me). Then 1.5 months. to refine the functions and the mathematics of cutting out the background, then another couple of weeks to correct errors, and as a result, another 2 months. to re-saw the entire architecture because further requirements turned the existing code into chaos.
I would like to know honest examples of who did what and how much time and effort it took him. In general, help me in the investigation!

Answer 1

According to the description of the task, it seems that the difficulties were here:
- UI
- interaction with the camera (at least integration with some third-party api)
- goodies for photo processing (obviously you should think about using existing solutions, which means integration)
2 months for the basic version - IMHO,
1.5 months for mathematics is quite acceptable - Did you try to come up with it yourself?
2 weeks to fix bugs
2 months to re-saw the entire architecture - if I understand correctly, you solved the problem with that architecture as well. Then they decided that the architecture was bad (here the issue is not performance, but experience in building architecture). Refactoring is usually a long thing. The only question is - what is the complexity of the architecture? What was done so that it had to be refactored. Well, the complexity of this task is not in the architecture.

Answer 2

trying to solve a problem that is too difficult for me at this stage of development

It looks like it.

Answer 3

Most likely, in your case, inexperience simply affects. Trained experienced people solve typical problems like nuts. But it takes decades to get there. So there is no need to get discouraged ahead of time.
And yes. Why did you suddenly decide that you have to be like someone from a book? Maybe the current performance is your ceiling? All people are different in characteristics and complex tasks are simply too tough for someone. And this does not mean at all that you are worse as a person, probably doing things where your best features are manifested, you will achieve / earn a lot!