I feel it is important that you get reviewed and get a feel on how you are going at least every 6 months. 3-4 months was working very well when I was working. Since I only really report my progress to this website, I guess this is where I should do my review.
December - Was really just about me. Unwinding, playing around and catching up on things I had missed out on.
January - Was filled with a holiday, some new toys and generally consuming time with no goals (Except for the purchase of a 4wd).
February - Finally got my car so spent a bit of time cleaning it up, getting it on the road and getting to know the car. I could actually feel time slipping away from me at this point so I bought a diary and started recording what I did with each day.
March - The website project started to have some visible functionality. I was still spending too much time playing games. With my diary as reference, I started to notice that I didn’t spend much time at all on the developement. This was also when I bought my eee, so I was playing with that a fair bit.
April - I think I spent far too much conceptualising what I wanted to achieve rather than just implementing and throwing away if it didn’t work.
May - I moved away of developing on my laptop to on my desktop. When I started the “dream” I thought I would dev on my laptop most of the day, away from games, IM, emails etc. But I installed openTTD which can just suck the time out of a day. I also missed casually chatting to some people and keeping up with what is going on. After this, I started spending a lot more full afternoons on coding because I had read slashdot, I knew I had no emails and I knew that no-one was playing games. Although I have lost some days when something interesting was on slashdot, or a new upfate for a game came out .
I mentioned that I bought a diary because the days seemed to slip away. It definitely helped slow the weeks. But after reviewing six months like I have, I don’t think I’ve achieved all that much.
One of my goals 6 months ago was to get the site I am working on ready about March/April and have it up running with some users in May/June to see whether it is worth continuing as a project. I am a little dissapointed that I haven’t got the site built by this time but am not going to give up on it just yet.
I see my 2 problems as sleeping in and motivation.
I really need to get back to working on the project at standard hours, say 9-5. At the moment I am waking up at 12:00, having lunch, reading news and then being ready to code between 2-3:00pm. Then there is 2-3 hours of code before people start jumping online and playing games.
Motivation is a little more tricky to work out because I don’t know what motivated me whilst I had a job. It was just a routine I did on weekdays (which could be a reason why I quit). Maybe it is because I’m working on a dull part of the site at the moment. I plan to implement the storage engine with a Java Content Repository but because the tools to integrate with it are currently ‘in developement’, I’ve sort of held off. I’ve considered buying a Wii as a sort of reward for getting to a milestone like implementing the storage engine in a JCR, but the Wii would just be another thing to distract me from coding.
One thing I don’t have is a task tracking tool whilst working on the project to give me feedback on how close I am to completing a stage. A while ago I decided that I should try to break the project up into stages I want to achieve.
- 0.1 - Working front end with dummy, in memory back end
- 0.2 - Change back end to be persistant
- 0.3 - Give the site a fair skin. (I don’t think pure css will cut it)
- 0.4 - Review, Check that it will handle at least some load. Probably a closed beta so I can get other people to check bugs and comment on skin
- 0.5 - Working release. The project is to help 2 groups of people connect. I need to get a minimalistic site going and see what people think and find out what they want next
Done, now where is my IDE…..
-= Comments
1. Tim Rowe | June 2nd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Wait, you’ve spent *six months* unemployed!?
Holy crap dude. Why??
2. pimaster | June 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Have you missed the parts of the blog that relate to me starting my own project?
I wanted to do my own thing whilst working for Hyro, but it becomes too time consuming to do both at once.
Following a dream is important.
I think it is important that I tackle a whole project on my own to improve what I can bring to a team environment.
It may also give me a chance to give back to some open source projects. Something I could have done at my old job, but not under my own pacing.
Most importantly, because I can.
3. Xavier | June 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“Wait, you've spent *six months* unemployed!?
Holy crap dude. Why??”
You’ve got this around the wrong way. If you’ve been employed for 6 months you better have a damn good reason.
It’s like when people ask ‘why are you vegan?' Worrong question. Why are you not?
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