Projects

Anyone who knows me knows me knows me.

_sidebar: _a shout out to Gertrude Stein

Actually, anyone who knows me knows that I generally have a few ambitious (and equally deficient) projects swirling around me at any given time. This past summer, I stayed away from anything that looked like a project for the first time since my early high school years. In some ways, I don’t regret that, but I’ve come to the conclusion that these silly ideas/projects are what keep me going. Over the years, the projects have generally been startup ideas, the majority of which are entirely valid and useful tools that:

happen to be created by the time I get around to it
suffer from over complexity due to my wild aspirations
suffer from lack of development support
suffer from lack of expertise in critical areas
suffer from my financial limitations

In some ways, I hate valid project ideas. The first few days, they keep me up at night and my mind on overdrive. They also distract from day time gigs, which, however welcome, is not a good thing. But then again, I hate when the idea I’ve been waiting so long to implement suddenly already exists. It also sucks when they’re undoubtedly better than what I could’ve cooked up or when they have a lively community.

For example, I’ve been waiting for the past year to create a workout logging/analysis site. Basically, for a while now, I’ve been using Google Spreadsheets to track my workouts and personal physical measurements over time. Throw that in some goals to create pretty graphs, you have a way to see your progress and some motivation to keep up with your goals. I won’t go into much detail, but I was all set to start on this, until I discovered gimme20.com, which, for the most part, does what I want. I do feel there are some missing features that are essential (mainly in visualizing your progress), but it’d definitely be easier to submit a feature request than to build my own system.

But, through each and every project, I’ve learned something new, and I think I’ve become a little better at controlling excitement until I prove an idea worthy of my attention. Free time is not as readily available, and the most important thing is to try to maximize what I do with it.

Anywho, while writing this article I realized I don’t want development related posts on this blog, so I think I’ll create another. I have two small projects I’m developing (semi-helpful open source add-ons to CodeIgniter) which I hope to release soonish, and I’ve also re-entered the world of Fanatasy Basketball, so stay tuned to finally seeing something tangible from my NBA stats db.