There is an inherent trade-off between doing things well and getting things done that I would like to share my thoughts on.

Starting and finishing something Is generally a good thing to do. What I say in the next paragraph may very well sound arrogant and condescending. I realise that writing something well is really hard, but the act of writing something down is (at least where I come from) not a particularly rare skill. Picking up a piece of paper and writing something down / drawing something is easy to learn but hard to master.

When Building something like a Car or an Aircraft it needs substantial amount of knowledge and experience to be able to produce something that is even considered functional by most people. When building something that has to 'work' like a machine there is a lot more physical constraints that have to be adhered to, so that it works when it is finished. This is why 'just start to build it' is much more a matter of having to repeat the (most often costly and sometimes even dangerous) mistakes of the people that came before. My approach for those kinds of things is mostly to try and learn about how others have done it before me and try to build my own version of that in such a way as to be able to reuse the thing that I have built. I want to be careful about what I am trying to build because of the consequences of failure other than the waste of time.

Because building such machines (even ones that are far, far simpler than say a car) There is value in both doing things for the sake of having something to play around with but there is also value in reading up about how it was done before (as most things where done before). This is the trade-off I have been thinking about lately.

I have recently started working at CERN and among one of the many things I realized is how hard it is to convey the understanding of a complex machine from one human mind to the other. Often the structure of the system cannot be conveyed properly and it needs many repetitions of the information to understand the system and to be able to relate the different components to each other.

The other thing that I have realized is how important it is to name things. Giving something a name that is unique (at least within the project that it is a part of) helps tremendously. Prototypes and samples, even ones that don't work as intended or ones that are somehow faulty, are Crucial to convey the Concepts and constraints of the system.

Managing the information of the system is also seemingly one of the most important and difficult task that there is. As accurate and correct information is crucial do making good design decisions and hopefully helps in reducing the amount of iterations that are needed to get the system into working order.

So in the context of working with others, I believe that the most important role of prototypes to serve as a physical manifestation of the design information. It is a coherent whole that, because of it's physical nature constrains the access to it and ability of modifying it, thus preserving consistency. Problems of course arise when there are more than one System and these systems are able to diverge to far from each other.

As interesting as these realisations are, It is actually not really the main thing that I want to write about here. The thing I have thought about and struggled with is the balance of action and (literature) research. Reading up on things helps with understanding them, especially when the system can be described well with graphs/models, while being able to keep these models fairly simple. Electronics is such a system. There are few components and their behaviour can be modelled well. From these building blocks the entire system can be built. There are only few of these fundamental components and the systems that can be built from them can be abstracted well, allowing for a straight forward hierarchy of modules and submodules reaching down until the fundamental components are reached.

Things like machines made from gears and cogs and structures have behaviour that is far more difficult to encapsulate, making the design of such things a lot more difficult. In the end this is the reason why most models that have been developed for such systems can only be used in a small envelope before being to inaccurate to use effectively.

Understanding a system properly takes a lot of time and effort. Modelling it well can really help a lot in gaining such an understanding. The trade-off is that modelling takes a significant amount of time and resources. When I want to finish a project, I really need to think about what it is I want from it. What the goals are. If I simply want to build a model boat that works for example, I can just buy components that do a well enough job to end up with somethig that works. Then not much understanding is needed. If it is the goal to produce something that I have truly understood, then a lot more effort is needed to properly model and understand the system, to perform measurements and so on.

Maybe the thing that I am complaining about is again, that the people that really strive for an understanding of such a system seem to be few and far between (CERN has been an exception to this) and that most don't understand or value such an understanding. There is (in my oppinion) many people that claim to understand something that in the end really don't. This may also just be a misinterpretation of their claims by me.

Because what I want to make is essentially my own understanding and with that documents that lay out my way of thinking about a thing, I essentially do every project in order to understand what it is made up of and why it works the way it does. Sure there are things that have not caught my immediate attention, but if you would let me