The problem is, I always have something in the works but I have a short attention span. So I have littered my hard drive and the net with partially done and abandoned projects. I think the solution to this is to get everything I have in the works out in the open and see if anyone is interested. Should anyone be interested, this might just spur me to keep paying attention.

From the Cathedral and the Bazaar:

• http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/x147.html

Ugh, so here's my problem:

I want to do something significant in my field, that being computer science in general, Internet and web technologies in particular. I have several problems though. They are:

• Although I've done some very cool things at work, they are proprietary and will never see the light of day outside of my office. I can't quite convince them that releasing my work to Open Source is a Good Thing.

• Being unable to use work time to do Significant Things, I must do it on my own time. Not so bad, but not so good either.

• There are so many Significant Things out there already. Just when I think I've come up with something clever, someone else has already been there and back. I suppose this is to be expected. Maybe I'm not as clever as I think. This is also to be expected. :)

• I suppose its still fun to re-create someone else's Significant Thing, in a new interpretation or language, with improvements, and maybe a better design according to me. But then, I start to think that the original Significant Thing was better and maybe I should just improve it. But then, I run into my gripes with the original again, and my cycle starts again. I've done this too many times.

• And then, there are Significant Things that I haven't yet begun to understand and have yet to detect whether they are a waste of time or worth intensive study. This makes me feel behind. I seem to think that I used to feel ahead.

Okay. The sum of these issues is a string of half-completed or half-started projects strewn across my hard drive, sourceforge.net (look for deus_x's projects), and vaguely mentioned here and there. And then there is my frustration when I see a new cool thing come out and I think "But! But! I was just working on that thing last year!" Which, of course, doesn't matter because I never finished my version of the cool thing.

So, what to do? Seems like I need to break the indecision tie between all these things, drop one of them. Should I just forge ahead reimplementing someone else's Significant Thing? (Competition is good!) Should I give in and get used to working within and improving someone else's Significant Thing? (Why reinvent the wheel?) Should I start diving into things I'm not sure about and try getting ahead again? (Must stay current in the field!)

Well, maybe this site is a start.

-- LesOrchard - 24 Feb 2002