I hinted in my last blog post that I have a new big creative project underway, and I’ve been going at it HARD almost every day for the last month and a half. I’m having a blast, and it’s exactly what I’ve been missing: going all-out on an absurdly ambitious and overly indulgent passion project that in all honesty might never see the light of day (judging by my track record, at least).
And the biggest thing that’s making the difference between this new project and any of my other projects all that failed quickly under pressure? I’m just… not giving myself any pressure. No deadlines, no consequences, no expectations. No lofty plan for how I’m going to finish it and publish it by XYZ date and how that will launch the transition into the Official Author/Game Developer/Etc segment of my professional career.
None of that. I’m doing this all for myself, and if anyone else ever wants to read/play/consume this piece of media themselves, too bad! or actually I guess just ask me if it’s far enough along to be shareable in any form, and if it is, I’ll probably just share it lol. Feedback and outside thoughts are still nice, after all. (But again, it’ll probably be a long time before it gets to that stage.) (That’s also why this post is all about “hey I’m doing a big project again and it feels pretty good” instead of about “hey here’s all the details of this new project, get hyped, don’t forget to like and subscribe for more updates!”)
There’s a wonderful freedom that comes with getting rid of all the pressure trappings while simultaneously accepting how big this project is, while also simultaneously accepting my core nature as someone who loves to organize all my shit into to-do lists and Trello boards and spreadsheets galore. I have all those things once again, just like I did in my Sprintlog Tasklog Era, except without the Sprintlog. Just a Tasklog, no sprints because no deadlines. A task will be done when it’s done, why bother with more details than that?
Of course, that also means I’m constantly flittering from one thing to the next, as my decently-likely-but-undiagnosed-ADHD-self is wont to do, but that’s all part of the fun. And also makes it all the more important that I have everything written down in a Trello Tasklog, because there’s so much to track.
And then there’s dependencies between tasks! I can have Tasks A and B, which both need to be done before I can do Task C, which needs to be done before I can do Tasks D and E. Trello doesn’t have dependency tracking built-in (which is WILD in my opinion), so I went on a long side-tangent exploring Trello’s Power-Up ecosystem for plug-ins that could give you dependency tracking.
There aren’t that many Power-Ups for dependency tracking to begin with—and once you rule out the paid Power-Ups, along with the “free trial for a month but just kidding this one is paid too” Power-Ups, there’s even less. And once you rule out the ones that don’t give you any kind of visual flowchart view, it’s even less. And it turns out exactly none of those allow a task to have more than one parent dependency, because they’re all tree-based I guess.
But that’s not how real-world task dependencies work. And so I did more research, and found out that the ideal data structure for a to-do list with dependency tracking was a directed acyclic graph. So, surely someone somewhere has made a to-do list app with this kind of functionality built in, right? Especially because to-do list apps are the straight up archetypal Software Developer Baby’s First App, right?!
Nope. Somehow, no one has done it before. One person blogged about the concept years ago, realizing just as I did that it was the optimal solution in its problem space, but… it just doesn’t exist. Which means, if I want it, now I have to make it myself.
That’s the kind of self-indulgent ADHD flittering I’m talking about with this whole project. For a few days, my main focus was in designing a more powerful to-do list app so I could keep better track of my actual project. It reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
I’m not working on that side-project anymore—I decided I can live without it. But I’m keeping the idea around because hey, it’s still an actual solution to an actual problem. Maybe someday I’ll want it after all. Maybe I’ll finish it and realize other people would want it too. Maybe I could create it as an actual product to compete with Trello and whatever else people use for big project management. Jira? Actually, now I need to look into Jira and see if I could be using it.
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. This is kind of a Monthly Update post, so I guess I should also say that Porydex is now officially back in passive mode. I’m touching it once a month to upload the month’s new data, but that’s it. Until Z-A comes out later this year, at least, which will probably upend all my plans. (But if I plan for that in advance, are my plans really being upended?)