2020-06-13

I don’t think that it’s an awe inspiring revelation that new ideas are sexy and exiting. Starting new projects, developing new designs, and shopping for and putting together BOMs is exciting.

What’s not sexy and not exciting is working on the last 5% of the idea. The grinding out of the bugs and refinement of ideas and dealing with design decisions that you have no one to blame but your self.

That’s where I’m at right now – grinding out very unexciting bugs and implementing mundane features. Chasing down timing related bugs in a multi-threaded application is neither sexy nor exiting and the same goes for implementing command line switches to allow use of alternate configuration files.

At the end of the day one can not repeatedly rewrite and redesign. At some point there has to be a result – something to show for all the time and effort. Even a hobby project has to come to fruition.

Going off on a tangent, the (forced) willingness to address the boring stuff is the major difference between “community driven” development and commercial development. In commercial development, teams of programmers working under the yoke of management, grind out bugs and unexciting features on a set timeline rather than rewriting and redesigning every time a squirrel runs past their office windows.

So that’s where I’m at. There have not been any ‘ah-hah’ moments and there have not been any breakthroughs. It’s just about grabbing that extra 45 minutes and using them to work on the project rather than vegging out in front of a Futurama episode that has been watched at least two dozen times or going to the bar or whatever else.