I came across two posts recently which inspired me to do a more thorough job in my day-to-day life as an engineer:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439052 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594264

At my current job, there is a lot of open field, and one can be creative about finding solutions. On one side, you really have to know and understand the business to come up with something "good". On the other side, I want to be able to clearly spec out what I am currently working on.

I most often jump head first into a problem, see if I can figure it out from the code, and think to myself: Once I know what I am dealing with, I am taking a step back and map it out on paper. Although, the second step rarely happens.

Next would be the case when creating open source libraries. I would like to start with an idea, and really spec out the broader implementation before jumping into coding.

So, dear HN crowd, what's your best insight into getting better at this?