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.