Aug 05

Project #1: Complete! Mostly!

Who Goes First is complete! On-time, all major features are in, I feel there’s a pretty good end-to-end story to at least publish to the website here. After showing it to the Principle Quality Analyst (i.e. wife), I should improve the info text explaining how to dumb thing works and some of the other texts before publishing it out to any marketplaces.

In the coming week I’ll run through a post-mortem on Project #1 before diving into Project #2. For now, and not that this is particularly interesting, but for posterity here is what the time log, task list, and future work lists ended up looking like:

Time Log

Who Goes First Time Log

Task Lists

Who Goes First Task List

Who Goes First Future Work

 

Jul 19

Project #1: Eighty-Twenty

The last 20% of a project takes 80% of the effort. In the case of project #1, I have completed 19 hours with 5 hours remaining leaving me at the last potential 20%. The effort necessary here is not technical or even availability driven, it simply hard to prioritize and just do. It is an 80% of a spiritual effort that must be conquered in order to get past what marathon runners call “The Wall.”

Twenty-four hours is hardly a marathon. Who Goes First has shown me that, no matter how small the project, the spiritual wall is there. It is the design.

Do we shelve the git repo and put it on proverbial shelf? NO! Do we start something new and come back to it…”later”. NO! We take our laptop to the motorcycle rally and after 400 miles a day of iron-butt riding we pile up back-support pillows on the hotel bed, open the IDE, and finish the damn thing by the end of the week. I write this here and now as a promise forged in electrons to myself and to belief in a world where sanity may prevail.

 

(7/28/2014) UPDATE: Success!