Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Same or Different?

Accomplishments. How do you react to them? I have some sort of 'buyers remorse' that follows on the heels of achievements. I'm briefly elated at my perseverance and excited about the progress, but then I feel kind of deflated about the whole thing. The challenge has been accomplished and it's receding into history. It's old news.

I tend to think that people are only as good as their last accomplishments. After battling a bevy of barriers and seemingly unreachable goals that were tougher than those previous, you always wonder a bit whether the next ones will be even more difficult.

There are two kinds of people though - those who get comfortable at their ability to do something, then do that same thing over and over, and those who treat an task as a stepping stone to another different and equally (or more) challenging task.

Once I've completed task X, I don't think much about ways in which I can do another X, I'm eager to do a Y.

So with a recent set of bugs and features fully squashed, and next steps clear and waiting for me, I'll have to shrug of the deflation of the last task's completion and push forward.

Researchinator is staring down a Y...

Friday, December 11, 2009

DevLogging and Getting Value From It

Referred back to my development logs of a year ago and I can see where I was in my project back then. Whew, wouldn't want to be facing all that work again. I think I'll do another off-site backup just for safety.

But I'm thinking I'd like to get some extra value out of that work-log. A thought is to pull it into a full featured editor and run some auto-indexing on it. Haven't looked at the state of those tools lately, but I'm assuming something will use dictionary help to identify stuff that might be index worthy. Would be a good longer term developer reference for when I get the sure-to-arise questions "Why the hell did you do that!?"

It's rewarding to see that I've made so much progress. I can't help but extrapolate and wonder how much further this project has to go tho.

Researchinator relishes the coming completion of this phase...

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Knee Deep

Just in snow though. Winter arrived today in our corner of Canada. It had been a nice November, but now we're getting it. Twas nice to get out for some lunch in spite of the weather. The morning was spent learning what I had done for one complex element of my application software, so that I can hopefully make an informed decision about how some UI changes this afternoon should be implemented.

My existing code seems to partially explore the two options I've been considering. I need to think carefully through it and choose a path forward. It's not just an 'A' versus 'B' thing... it may include an 'A' and 'B' approach. I don't think there's a 'C' approach, and I don't think there is a none-of-the-above option either. I'm leaning a little more 'B' than 'A', but well, maybe not.

It's one of those kinds of days. I think the right answer is making an answer, rather than thinking too long to find the perfect outcome.

Researchinator struggles with alphabetic option selection...