Streamin, and some thoughts on mentality (Patreon)

I ran out of time typing a full post before stream, so I'll give y'all the progress update afterward >.<

I have a coding stream starting now! If you miss the stream, VODS are also available. ('Videos' tab at the top.)

To new patrons: We’re in the middle of an absurdly-long update cycle. Here’s the summary and how to access content.

Thoughts on mentality 

Growing up and leaving the comfort zone

My brain is good at handling small problems where I can keep all the details in mind at once. But as soon as the project is bigger than I can hold in my mind at one time, I suddenly feel like an idiot and I don’t know how to do anything. When I hit a point like that, usually I say fuck it, forget the big picture, just hyperfocus on this one task until it’s done. That’ll probably solve whatever problem I’m having. Cause like… I know how to do that. What I don’t know is how to not do that and still make progress.

That mentality is the reason why this project has had such an unpredictable release schedule, even before this big rewrite. I feel uncomfortable, so I flee to my comfort zone. It’s not healthy. I want to respect the money everyone is paying to see this project succeed.

Worse still… we’re getting to the stage where I now need to be extremely careful with my time and focus. When there was a ton of infrastructure left to build, I could hyperfocus on the code and it’d be fine and productive. Now it’s possible to release “fairly soonish”, depending on what gets included in the first release.

I can’t just put my head down and work for a month on a single feature anymore. It’s time to prioritize and lay out a road map. I’ve learned this lesson before: taking a step back and plotting out the next task after I finish something leads to better results. Duh.

To be painfully honest, I’ve received multiple offers for help with exactly that, and have severely failed to open up and work with anyone. In the least self-deprecating way possible- I need to grow up.

To put it in a more constructive way- I have to go through some personal and emotional growth in this area. Gotta let go of the security blanket of a bad self-image. “Oh, I’m bad at planning stuff, so of course I’m not able to competently lay out a long term roadmap.” No, bad bug!

Grow up, face the challenge.

:’)

Organization

After discussing AI, I knew there was a big possibility of the project scope exploding. I want to do so many new things, so it’s smart to plan ahead, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart to just do them all now. As much as my instinct is to just… do it.

I spent a whole day just breaking down tasks, notes, ideas, and musings into a centralized place.

Something that happens with ADHD is a tendency to have a bunch of different big lists of things that you never go back to. I’ve tried trello, sticky notes, a paper notebook, another paper notebook, trello again, half a dozen plain text files that I just keep open in my editor, etc… It’s hard. It has to be written down for me to remember. But then what do I do with it?

Currently, I’m using a trello-like board (https://hacknplan.com) to do stuff. Trello would be fine too, but the organization of this fits my tastes a little more. Just collecting all recent thoughts and discussion into a formatted place has helped me be confident that even if I don’t remember things right now, that I’ll be able to come back to it with all the needed context.

Over-organizing

Last thing before the stream starts- I've often fallen into the bad habit of overplanning things to a ridiculous degree, spending many many hours on outlining my plans, only for them to fall apart a week later. 

There's a balance. You can only effectively plan things you have experience with. Planning the unknown is bound to be a waste of time. I'm trying my best to organize instead to my own ability to consistently make and follow plans, rather than for some kind of robot version of me that's actually good at planning.

Anyway, I'm late for stream!