A few things have been happening lately which have reduced the velocity of my current project:
- I had some ideas for my 'big idea' SAAS that I wanted to spike out
- Liberal democracy and the rule of law apparently imploded in the United States.
- BlueSky took off and I've been having a lot of fun being a post goblin on a site that feels like Twitter in 2010.
The items above contributed to a motivation slump for Project 2. There is a lot going on and it is difficult to find to motivation for building a fully fledged solution purely as an academic exercise - even if the learning potential is huge.
That being said t, one of my key self-improvement objectives is to actually finish projects that I start and NOT give up when I hit a slump. I will get this thing 'functionally' complete and deployed even if it is just for personal bragging rights.
Apart from the above distractions, I think there are two things killing my want to continue with this project
- It is basically pointless as a SAAS - the chances of making money are so low as to be non-existent
- UX design is really hard. I can write competent code, but even with all of the tools of Vuetify and modern CSS at my disposal I can't make it so that the website 'looks professional'. There are just too many UX tricks of the trade that I don't seem to know. Having the artistic talents of a brick also does not help.
Item 1 I can probably cope with. Ultimately this project 'is a learning by doing' exercise and I just need to suck up the fact that it probably isn't going to be anything else.
Item 2 is a really an issue for me. When working on the solution I get easily distracted by the low quality look and feel and then started fiddling with things to 'improve it'. This doesn't usually have a good outcome (ok, the end results are terrible) and wastes a lot of time.
Moving forwards I am going to have to be more disciplined about this and stick to also scaffolding the UX . Once the site is functionally complete I will look for a pre-built template that I can migrate it to.
I need to eat some humble pie here. For most of my career I have looked at UX designers and thought
"that's all you do? I could do that if I could be bothered but I want to write code instead". It turns out that no - I can't do that and I don't have the bandwidth to learn.
"that's all you do? I could do that if I could be bothered but I want to write code instead". It turns out that no - I can't do that and I don't have the bandwidth to learn.
Today's personal lesson is to stick to your strengths and download/buy/hire for the skills you don't.
