Simon Willison’s Weblog

My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects (via) Mitchell Hashimoto wrote this piece about taking on large projects back in June 2023. The project he described in the post is a terminal emulator written in Zig called Ghostty which just reached its 1.0 release.

I've learned that when I break down my large tasks in chunks that result in seeing tangible forward progress, I tend to finish my work and retain my excitement throughout the project. People are all motivated and driven in different ways, so this may not work for you, but as a broad generalization I've not found an engineer who doesn't get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.

For backend-heavy projects the lack of an initial UI is a challenge here, so Mitchell advocates for early automated tests as a way to start exercising code and seeing progress right from the start. Don't let tests get in the way of demos though:

No matter what I'm working on, I try to build one or two demos per week intermixed with automated test feedback as explained in the previous section.

Building a demo also provides you with invaluable product feedback. You can quickly intuit whether something feels good, even if it isn't fully functional.

For more on the development of Ghostty see this talk Mitchell gave at Zig Showtime last year:

I want the terminal to be a modern platform for text application development, analogous to the browser being a modern platform for GUI application development (for better or worse).