So the Year of Done is off to a bad start

01 Oct 2024

It’s a new month, which means I should be done my current project and starting a new one, right? Time to release my habit tracker. haha… well… so it’s not done. Hell, there’s not even enough to show anything. Realistically I barely started. So this is a bit of a retrospective on what went wrong and how I can avoid it as we continue the year.

Problem 1: A failure of scope

I, as a person, struggle greatly with taking a project from 0 to 1. Once I have something to build off of, I shine. Going from 1 to 10? That’s easy. But that first 1? Man I struggle. And I didn’t account for that. So my scope was way too ambitious. When I come back to this project (Maybe in November?), I’ll shrink the scope down. Start with just daily habits. If I have time later in the month, I can look into weekly and monthly habits. But overall, I need to remember to keep scope smaller. I have less time than I think.

Problem 2: A failure of deadlines

I made 1 singular post about habbit. That’s not great. It caused me to, in some ways, completely forget about working on it. Which is a problem. I’m certainly going to get nowhere fast doing that. So in the coming months, I need to remember: weekly goals, assessed each weekend. These assessments should come alongside a new post online. Ideally on Saturdays, but Sundays work too if I’m busy.

Problem 3: A failure of frameworks

I’ve only ever built a full webapp from scratch once. It was for a class, and despite it being a class on web dev, it didn’t do a great job on teaching us how to keep up to date with various frameworks and tech stacks. To make a long story short, I second guessed myself and changed my stack (which means a restart) 3 times. That… sucks. And it was a mistake. In the future, I really need to trust my gut. Pick one and just go for it.

All in all, a learning experience for sure. Anyway, it’s October now. So I’m putting this on hold. This month, I want to try to put together a nice Halloween costume.