thedeadone.net » coding

For fun or for success?

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:30:47 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this in the back of mind for a few days, but I find myself looking at my projects in two ways. Pet Projects or Products.

I hear a lot about how to make creative works successful, you know mantras like “fail early, fail often”, etc. On one hand I have a ton of unfinished short stories, ideas and notes filling up my notebook and unfinished scraps of software on my laptop’s harddisk. Yet I still preserve with my Lost Heroes RPG, a project perhaps I should have quit on an age ago when it has become apparent it’s not going to be some sort of whirlwind success or if a minor success (for the record, I’m not going to quit on it and I’m currently working on a rules system for it).

Makes me think, there are two types of projects, defined more by your attitude towards them than anything else. A product is something you’re trying to “sell” (in some abstract sense) and if it doesn’t sell or find an audience, it’s a failure. But a pet project is something you do because you want to do it. It’d be great if you find an audience, but if you don’t, so what?

For me products are the stuff I do in work. I get paid to do them and they are done at a professional level. You have to be ruthless about it, avoid adding new features, doing everything as right as you can straight up.

Pet projects are stuff I do for fun, in my spare time. I make mistakes, I learn. I explore options and tangents and cut away stuff at my own impulse. Lost Heroes RPG is my on-going pet project. I’ve learned about writing, mythology, game design, etc. and it’s brought me in contact with other gamers and writers. Even if, no-one else reads it, I’m still enjoying working on it.

It’s a little bit about sanity too, if I’m working on something because I’m enjoying the work, then “failure” is only what I chose it to be. If it’s a product, I can prepare myself for failure by simply distancing myself. I’m not talking about what failure is, only how I treat and react to my spare time projects.

TDO-Mini-Forms was also a pet project, one that perhaps should have been a product in hindsight. I was working on it because I was enjoying it. I was learning about PHP, coding for the web, working with WordPress and so on. But people were and are using it, expecting a supported product. That’s a bit of a disconnect, working on something as a pet project but random people consuming it as a product. I would have been happy with a small number of users and supporting them, while extending it and learning how to do things right.

But the number of users is quite high. Still not getting used to google occasionally telling me about some random dude on Twitter who stating that it’s utter crap because of X, Y or Z. It stomps all over why I was enjoying working on it. Turning a pet project, not into a product, but into a chore was/is a death knell working for the appreciation of faceless strangers. Will I start up work on TDO Mini Forms? Maybe, but I’ll need an attitude adjustment towards it first. I’d be tempted to start over, doing something from scratch, taking what I learned from TDO-Mini-Forms. I’d also need a machine that gives me reams of extra spare time to work on it as well.

I think if I were to start trying to write a novel (I have a few ideas) for example, I would be treating it as a Product, taking on board everything I’ve learned from writing Lost Heroes RPG and the various little flash fictions or short stories I’ve hacked together and being a bit more ruthless about it. The same would go for any software project I might start that’s bigger than a very simple tool.

Forgive me Internet, for I have been lax. It has been over six months since I did any work on TDO Mini Forms…

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 31 May 2010 12:08:39 +0000

Even finding time to write this blog post is problematic, having to push it into the few spare minutes during my lunch break. I simply have not found the time to work on TDO Mini Forms. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t found time and motivation this last six months.

Part of the problem is that I implemented TDO Mini Forms for fun, a neat little plugin for WordPress I could use on some web projects (all dead now by the way). Then it was driven by my love of coding and the small crowd of users. But I changed projects in work several months back and could no longer slip the time in to bash away at some code for myself, at least during the daylight hours and now there is a mountain of support requests on the forums that I can’t even comprehend getting through and a slow disconnect between what I enjoyed about it and what I wanted to enjoy about it.

Essentially, it’s not fun any more. It’s bug fixes, RTFM and maintaince upgrades (with WordPress 3.0 is coming and that’s like a big stomping unstoppable giant, which I fully expect to splat my plugins…) it becomes daunting. I’ve added too many features (that can do wonderful things), and people either complain about them (“it’s too complex”) or demand more (“editable image uploads ftw!”). The whole code base of TDO Mini Forms evolved chaotically and the idea of re-writing (and having to maintain some degree of backwards compatibility) it’s quite off-putting.

And then I’m working on another creative project that I’m genuinely motivated about, but isn’t software. And when I have free time, I dive into this project, because I want to, not because I have to.

It might be more interesting if I was getting more out of it, say I was a web-developer (I’m not, I’m embedded engineer) and it was promoting my career or getting my clients, I was a big wordpress-advocate and people were coming to my blog to hear the cool things I say (I don’t have much cool things to say, unless you like tabletop roleplaying…), I was making enough money from donations I could afford to get a new gadget every once in a while or it was powering a big project I loved, but it’s not.

So I’m not sure where that leaves TDO Mini Forms. I think probably it’s been on an unofficial hiatus for the last while already. I don’t want to dump it, but I’m not sure of when I’ll get back to it. I have been thinking about it a lot, but not working on it. (I may write up those thoughts in a future blog post).

One thing I will say, if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and hard to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.

I have to send out a big thanks to all the people who have donated to the plugin. I really do appreciate it and it’s why I went so far with it. Thanks for listening.

Going on holidays tomorrow! :)

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:20:31 +0000

So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms WordPress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my WordPress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while!

3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:56:55 +0000

And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

Phew! That creative burst is over I can get back to doing other stuff

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:30:52 +0000

Last Friday I release “TDO-Forum WordPress Theme“, thankfully. It was a piece of code that burst out of me, cut through my on-going writing/roleplaying project and other coding projects, stopped me from blogging, demanding to be finished. It even bit into my work during the day (but so does the lack of sleep from having two small kids). The only time it didn’t swallow was when I was with my family (shows you my true priorities I guess).

Do you ever get that? A piece of writing or coding that demanded to be finished, that consumed you until it was done or you managed to pull away from it?

I’ve read about many writers who claim that a book or story forced itself out of them. Though coding isn’t the same as writing, I think the abstract mental creative-process is the same (the skill-base is obviously different). I think it’s something different to “the flow” (I’ve written about it before and here is the wikipedia entry on the flow psychological state). Certainly the flow is an accelerator or enabler of creative bursts, and coding and writing neatly fit into the model of the flow.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that the piece of writing will be exceptional or the code perfect. Though I do think they benefit from the obsessive neurotic drive of creating it.

thedeadone.net » coding

For fun or for success?

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