About 2004, I reached a stall state. I did some serious wilderness time and it took about six years to settle down into a new zone.<p>This was the trigger for me: (1) I had a development career where I tried to build every application centred around databases; (2) I now had enough experience under my belt to join the dots on where this ended up, and to see that this was futile. But I wasn&#x27;t able to see past my everything-is-a-hammer.<p>There is a technique I took a lot of value from in moving on, and I still use it most days. It is this: think hard, ten times, about a problem that is tickling you. I went through a notation phase, but now I just type out my stream of conscious into a text document.<p>In the past, I would have spent a year building the first thing that came into my house. Now I can consider a large number of ideas, and have context for judging them to be good or bad ideas. The first thing I invest development energy in is significantly better than it would otherwise have been.<p>It&#x27;s cool too in that you don&#x27;t need to be at your desk to do it. You can be in a restaurant, or sitting on the beach, or on the bus, or on an exercise bike. My favourite spot at the moment is lying on a couch. The good thing about doing it away from your desk is it takes away the pressure to rush through the uncertainty.<p>&quot;choreographing 3 enterprise systems to work together&quot;<p>How do you think about message-passing between them? Why do you do it that way? Think ten times about different approaches you could use. You could use the exercise to force you to question your passive assumptions. You may find that you are scared by uncertainty. Your subsconscious could choose to fix on something familiar, than to admit that it does not know. All the more reason to do this away from your desk. Take a walk.<p>Feel free to ping me via my account email if you want to discuss your situation in more detail.