Big Project. Little Time.

Despite only getting a few hours a week to work on my project, I can’t seem to put it down. Most days, I don’t get a chance to work on it at all. I work at a startup company in town and I give it a good day’s work. Then, I come home and I’m bombarded with the noise of my awesome family of five. It takes a bit to adjust from the quiet at work but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It often seems to take all of the energy that I have left just to get the kids in to bed (and make it stick). Even so, I can’t seem to lay down without making a little bit of progress with my project.I’ve had more false starts than I can remember. I’d get excited about an idea and immediately begin the sprint to the finish. Soon though, I’d find myself buried in a mountain of code that is already unmanageable. I’d abandoned testing to try and make a little progress up front and I was paying for it.Oh, I’d make progress. I’d usually make a few very gratifying break-throughs. Then, I’d be completely out of energy and find out that someone else already did what I was going after anyway. Beaten again, I’d forget about the project and eventually remove my working copy of it from my system (revision control system still intact).This one is different. I don’t let code quality slip. I spend more time in the test suite than I do the code. Refactoring is common and I fix the bugs as they arise. I’ve already lasted a bit longer on this project than any other and I feel like I’ve got the energy to keep going. At times, I feel like I may never get there but I think that in a few months, I could have something to show that may help me to start selling the vision.