An Incrementalists Woes

Have you ever inventoried your Github repos? Let’s take a look at mine and see if I’m a Dreamer, a Doer or an Incrementalist.

In his book “Making Ideas Happen,” Scott Belsky describes three different personalities:

  • Dreamers
  • Doers
  • Incrementalists

A dreamer has ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. So many ideas that they can’t get to them all. A doer likes tasks, they want to follow a path to and end. A dreamer/doer pair can really get things done.

An incrementalist is a combination of the two, they can switch between dreamer and doer as the situation requires. This can be a superpower when working with others but it can lead to a cesspool of half-baked projects if working alone. I have discovered that I am an incrementalist. As proof, I present my github repos.

My friend has a home office where he runs his consulting business. In that office, he has a bookshelf full of books that he hasn’t read yet, some of those books have been there for years. He calls that bookshelf his Shrine to Good Intentions.

I recently made a new repository to share with him a project I was working on, a game using the Entity-Component-System pattern. I suddenly realized that my own Shrine to Good Intentions was 60 repos of half-baked software. That prompted me to inventory my repos to see if there was anything actually uasable in there.

I use Github organizations to group my software by my hobby interests. I have AE0ZW for my amatuer radio projects, OpenCDSi for the Worldvax immunization project,Anso Designs for a landing page, and Other for my blog. My first step was to do a count by organization.

  • AE0ZW 11 repos
  • OpenCDSi/Worldvax 17 repos
  • Anso Designs 1 repo
  • Personal 29 repos

As I scanned these repos I realized that I could classify each repo by what I had hoped to gain from that particular project. Those classes are:

  • Public good - Open source/maybe of interest to others
  • Commercial - Commercial projects
  • Discovery - Projects to learn about some aspect of hw/sw.
  • Dependencies - Projects to support other projects
  • Conference talks - Projects to support my conference talks

Some repos could belong to more than one class.

All of the repos for OpenCDSi/Worldvax are in Public Good, some of these are also in Discovery. Anso Designs has the only Commercial project and the AE0ZW projects are all Discovery.

For the Personal repos, we have:

  • Public good 6 repos
  • Discovery 13 repos
  • Dependencies 2 repos
  • Conference talks 12 repos

It looks like I’m most successful when I’m writing code to support a conference presentation. Those are the times that I’ve moved from dreamer (had an idea for a topic) to doer (completing the slides and code). As an incrementalist, I need more of those.

Written on May 14, 2025