October 31st, 2006 Luke
I finished reading Getting Real, and in the 3 days since I have to say that I’ve been surprised by my productivity. I find myself being far more productive in regards to just general coding activity; I’ve already sketched out all but one of the interface screens for Parakeet.
It’s been very refreshing, working on this. Parakeet is no longer something I should keep planning and planning and planning; it’s just something that I like to do and want to finish. It’s morphed into more of a passion than a chore, which was what I was making it.
I’m a lot more focused on my code, also. Even when I’m at school I’m brainstorming, thinking about what small adjustments the interface might need(in the last 3 days, 2 days have been just tweaking and making sure everything worked well together). I picked up a small(64Mb) USB drive in order to move the code from home to school, so that I can work on it wherever I need to. I also loaded the drive with Firefox 2.0 and Crimson Editor, so that I’ve got my development environment right there.
All in all, I’m enjoying putting the articles and advice from Getting Real to use. I’m going to get back to that now.
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October 28th, 2006 Luke
After finding out that 37signals was releasing a free edition of their web development book, I decided that I would try reading it(it’s free, right?)
So far, I’ve read about 6 pages, and it seems like a pretty good approach to take. There seems to be a lot of good advice inside this book that I could really put to use while working on some of my projects, and I’m thinking that I’ll start using it.
I’ve been tossing around a few webapp ideas lately, one an online budgeting tool and the other just a sort of social experiment. I think they’re both cool ideas, and I’d build them just so I could use them. But I’ve been stuck in the planning phase for a really long time. Reading this book, I’m beginning to warm up to the approach of just getting it done, and then adjusting and tweaking it later.
My problem, when developing things, is that I’m always tweaking before I release something. I’ve gotten about halfway on multiple projects and then dropped them, because I’ve realized that they need a complete rewrite/retweak. This is a problem. I need to start writing things and just write them, and save the tweaking for later.
Along those lines, I’ve started(after about a month and a half of planning) work on one of my projects(currently called Parakeet). I have to say, just buckling down and working on it is a lot more rewarding than endlessly planning things out. It’s becoming more and more apparent that I have the ‘paralysis through analysis’ illness.
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