I can be an awfully indecisive person at times. Often I’ve been in the grips of analysis paralysis unable to pick a course of action to take, crippled with choice. When I was a student I read The Dice Man and was sorely tempted to make all my decisions by rolling a die or tossing a coin. Needless to say this is maybe not the best way for a person to navigate through life.
About 9 hours ago I dandered down the road to see what was happening at the FlackNite event being hosted in Farset Labs. When I finally got myself settled down with network access and a cup of coffee and said hello to everyone it seemed I was the only one without a project to work on. Nightmare. Decisions, Decisions I couldn’t think of what to focus on but Rob and Pete were sitting next to me and tinkering with some Objective-C and Cocoa.
I’ve often joked about putting together an app to track my coffee consumption, such is my reputation for consuming the black goodness. Like a lot of my other personal projects, the idea had a prolonged gestation period and was finally born through a welcome spark of motivation. Crafting fine web APIs Over the past 6 months the bulk of what I’ve been doing day to day with Vigill has involved building web APIs for consumption by mobile clients.
I was on-site with Vigill one day before Christmas and I mentioned to Oisin an idea I had for an app. I was sick of having endless tabs open in Chrome, hogging memory, each one some seeming important enough at the time that I read it but now just a contextless enigma. If I at least knew how many tabs I had open, it would be a step in the right direction I thought.
Quite often I feel the need to learn something new for the sake of learning something new. Covey aficionados would know this as sharpening the saw. I usually struggle deciding upon something however as there are so many areas to choose from in the software world and it isn’t everyday I feel drawn enough to something to put time and effort into it on top of holding down a day job.
After last week’s great Xcake meet I felt a fresh surge to take on new challenges and bend some less-familiar pieces of technology to my will. Motivation The first product of this enthusiasm was a prototype web app built to get a bit more experience with Python and Google App Engine. A few days later it got an API. The resulting rapid feedback loop led me to pick up my copy of Beginning iPhone Development which had been sitting gathering dust for the last couple of years and get stuck back into following the examples.