My endless circle of projects

Hi! I haven’t written a blog post in a while after making three very quickly, but here I am trying to get one more in before school starts. Since my last posts and making this blog, I’ve been focusing on three different projects (and I went on vacation). My first was an attempt to make a Tolkien-style fantasy map generator with Java AWT. I had just started rereading Lord of the Rings, and I found myself fascinated by the intricacy and beauty of the maps. It turned out to be a very, very difficult task: after successfully generating okay-looking coastlines, I was never able to generate a convincing forest after a week of trying everyday. I also lost my motivation, so I decided to move on, but maybe I’ll revisit it in the future.

Next, I wanted to tackle something I had been wanting to do for a while: creating an app for my Garmin Forerunner 55. I settled on a guided breathing exercises app because I thought it would be quick and simple to make. However, the Connect IQ SDK provided by Garmin proved to be confusing and poorly documented, and there were few tutorials online that I could follow. Another thing that made it very annoying to use was how slowly the debugging process took: using the simulator, I had to stop it and relaunch it, which took a pretty long time, and to test it on my own device, I had to plug it in to my computer, export the project, put it on the watch, and unplug it again, which also proved very clunky. It was just a huge learning curve before I became familiar enough with it to finally create my app. Thankfully, the process of getting on the Connect IQ store (so anyone with the same model can go and download it) was pretty easy. Afterwards, though, I didn’t really want to go through the headache of adding new features, so I left it at that.

Finally, having returned from vacation, I decided to come back to one of my other projects in circulation: my running log app. After a couple months away from it, I realized that it looked pretty terrible on the surface, and so I overhauled the whole UI to give it a more modern look. This allowed me to clean up all the clutter that was the previous UI, as well as creating a more consistent look throughout the app. At the moment, I’m still going strong with it, and I’m hoping to be able to release it to some app store soon.

Cycling through these projects like this is a tendency of mine, for I find that after I have been working on one thing for a couple weeks, I become bored with it and move on. As a result, I often find myself juggling multiple projects all the time. I’ve always thought that this was something to be avoided, starting projects and rarely getting around to finishing them. I guess I just thought that when you get a job as a software developer, you work on a project until it’s done. Period. Because that’s just what you have to do. So by changing projects constantly, I was somehow hurting myself by not being prepared for the future (I’d like to work in tech). But now I’m beginning to realize that maybe this is just part of a natural cycle. For people just coding for fun, like me, this is probably commonplace, and that’s okay. I don’t want to drag myself through a long project that I don’t have interest in, because that would take away what makes me love coding: I can just make whatever cool stuff I want, whenever I want, and I don’t have to push anything or have deadlines.

Maybe I’m just making excuses, but I think that’s a pretty legitimate point, and that’s what I’ll tell myself from now on: keep it fun. Because why not?