Projects don't die on a hard problem. They die on a Monday

😮‍💨 Folks, I'm done in

I'll say it plainly.

It doesn't look like this is coming off.

It looks like I'm genuinely doing a thing I don't know and can't do. Which is exactly what I wrote about myself a couple of parts ago — only then it sounded like a position, and today...I'm just done in.

And the current version looks sad.

Not "raw, buggy, but it exists". Sad.

I'm not going to flip that into something upbeat. Today it is what it is.

⏱ Fifty against two hundred

Now the numbers, because they explain more than the mood does.

The prototype — the browser one, the one I use every day — cost me about fifty hours, rewrites, rollbacks and walking back included.

Here I've spent two hundred. At least.

And the picture still looks a great deal bigger than I assumed it was when I sat down.

Although on the two hundred, I suspect that's an over-optimistic optimist talking.

Here's the part that takes your legs out. Not that it's hard. That I still can't see the edge.

Fifty hours gave me a thing I use every day.

Two hundred gave me a thing I can't show anyone.

🚏 A break

I want a break.

For today, to start with.

Though honestly, it could run longer. Seven days. Seven weeks. Seven months — I don't know, and I'm not going to pretend I do.

This is where the genre says I write that I'll be back with fresh energy.

I won't.

Sod the side project today.

Today is a Skyrim day.

It would have been a Witcher day, but the remaster ships tomorrow, so the game is literally sitting there on the Switch and I can't start it until the magic date, and, fine.

So I'll sit down and work out where I left off.

🔌 Engineer honesty moment

No code today. None. Not a line, not a commit, not an open project.

And the only thing I did for this project today is write this text.

I know how it looks: a man stops making the thing and goes on talking about it.

But if I cut this day out and turn up next time with a breezy "here's what I got done", then everything written here before it becomes untrue.

Projects don't die on a hard problem. They die on a Monday, on the way to the office, when you look at what you've made and can't see the point of it.

💬 A question

How many of your projects are sitting on a break you declared "just for today"?

I have one now. And the unpleasant part is that I honestly can't tell you what makes this break different from all the ones after which nothing happened.

Tell me how it goes for you 👇

What comes next, I don't know.

This is the first part I'm ending without a "next".