Flashes of Panic

The Illustrator spent the morning and part of the afternoon yesterday packing down his ski track, with such unusual grooming tools as a canoe and some pallets. I went over late in the afternoon and tromped around it a few times; he thought that after a nice night below freezing it should be pretty firm today. I’m wishing I was going to have some time to go down and do a few laps.

As were were snowshoeing, he explained that he’d been on it for four or five hours. “The process is more fun to me,” he said. I thought to myself, “That sounds familiar.” “Are you sure you’re not an programmer?” I asked.

I think there’s a twilight condition we try to live in when we’re working on a project. On one side is the fun of developing something and seeing it take shape with your effort. It’s a pretty powerful feeling to watch the pieces come together, and it’s why I like to have a runnable prototype of whatever I’m doing as soon as possible. The other side is the fun of sharing the finished product, of having created something useful and functional.

You can’t really have it both ways, though. You can share your progress on an incomplete project with others, but the most likely reaction is a sort of disinterested “Eh.” And you can infinitely prolong a project with additional features and refinements, but then you’ve never really created anything. (The Dark Side is when you declare something complete which really isn’t; the users find and judge the incompleteness, and never see what you really intended.)

I’ve been working on a project at home, in my “spare time,” for two or three weeks now, trying to create a simple, flexible, and dynamic photo gallery to save A. some work time. (Never mind why I’m doing pro bono development for sites which could theoretically pay; it’s an involved story and not to the point.) I did pretty well displaying images and moving around the gallery, but captions were a bit of a puzzle. I played around with a few different methods of storing them, including an included PHP file and (at Brent’s suggestion) as JPEG metadata, but eventually settled on XML after Julie provided the clues to get me through a confusing patch.

With most of the flashy parts solved, now, I have a few gritty back-end things to fix before it’s really done and I can hand it over. And I’m not anxious to do them. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t look fun, or because I know that if I do them, the fun will be over. It’s like I don’t want it to be done. I don’t know if that’s because I’m fearing that it won’t do everything it’s supposed to, or be a disappointment, or if it’s because I don’t want it to be done and out of my hands.

I suppose I could continue offering upgrades.

Now Playing: Seen Your Video from Let It Be by The Replacements