Category Archives: Developer’s Journey

Non-Fiction: The journal of a discouraged developer. After hitting a low, I’ve decided to share my experiences. It’s not a record low by any means, just relative to what I’ve experienced lately. Hopefully it tells the tale of how I brought my self out of this (or perhaps with the help of others), but only time will tell.

The Dream, Is It Me?

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My dreams may define who I am, but lately, I’ve been asking if they should. Do I hold on to them because of the time I invested, and the dread of thinking I’ll have wasted too much of my life on them? Or is there something deeper?

What if my dreams were to be an astronaut, a doctor, a teacher, or a famous singer? Should I go for them? I guess there is still that slim chance that i could fulfill them. But what if I want to be the President of the United States? I lack one critical thing. Being born american or even having an american citizenship. Who knows, perhaps the laws will lighten up for me to be one. But if I’m 100% illegible to be the President, does that mean I give up on my dream to be it even though I’d be doomed to failure? To nail it down to impossible, what if I want to be … another nationality by birth, be born a dog or live in 400 B.C. ? Where do you draw the line between a dream that should be given up, and one that you let live or nurture?

It’s been several weeks now and I think I’m opening up to the idea of changing my dreams if not letting them die. At first, the thought of it was making me bitter. If I were to compare this process to the Kübler-Ross model then I definitely didn’t notice the Denial part. I know there was a time of anger and even a little bit of depression. There could have been the bargaining stage, but I don’t remember it. I think I’m in the acceptance stage.

The dreams may change to something a little more tangible as something that I alone can do. Such as writing a book. By a non-author, good or bad, it’s at least tangible.

Perhaps the frustration and invisible resistance that I have received so far is loose evidence that my current path is not intended for me. Like trying to continue to go through the closed opportunity door. I could still go through it but not without much hardship, frustration, and pain when in the end, it would fulfill me more to try another door for a totally different dream that was evidently my true fate. I’m not in this for happiness, I’m in it for Joy [1]. Resisting my fate will cause frustration, even if I don’t know what the path is. I won’t truly experience joy unless I’m walking in Him and following the path He’s leading me in.

Some may say I’m giving up. I’m coming to realize that should I fulfill my dream, or not, that when I die, I can’t take them with me. I’m sure Mozart cares little about his masterpieces now that he’s been dead for a few centuries now.

Let the dreams take care of themselves, I shall focus on more important things.

1. A Church on the Rock Podcast by Dave Overholt. Message entitled Unfinished Masterpiece: JOY.

New Perspective and House Cleaning

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I’ve decided to change my perspective. This journal isn’t about a discouraged developer… it’s about a developer who just happens to be discouraged at the start. Hopefully there are more inspiring posts later on and stories of success. That is why I don’t want this journal to be stuck on the negative. By nature, I am a negative person. Something I’ve been fighting for decades now. I can go into this later.

So I’ve mentioned what I’ve worked on before. I had made the choice that I need to determine what dream / project will die now. Made mostly out of being bummed out after a horrible start with my android app. Before I made the app free, I only had about eleven purchases. Pretty poor for, well, any app. It has more now, but that’s because it’s free. Since then I’ve released the source code in case anyone wants to learn off of the code.

I’ve realized that I’m no business person and it’s not likely going to come to me one day. I’d have to go and take a full course on entrepreneurship and even then, there is no guarantee that I’d learn how to handle starting up a business (or running one). That realization was probably the second part of my discouragement, which lead to me thinking… “should I just give up on my dreams?” Google searches on that exact phrase will give you plenty of posts on NO! responses. One even suggested that giving up on them even could lead to depression if your dreams are big enough. Don’t ask me for the reference because I cannot find it anymore. And Google searches for it give me results without the words I searched for… Thanks Google. Sigh.

It’s odd. It seems at times, I warm up to the idea that I should let some dreams die so I can focus on others… then several days later I think, well, maybe I shouldn’t give them up. I could put them on the back burner for later. Two are fairly large and I’ve invested a lot of time doing what I enjoy the most… the lore creation. Well it might be second to actually seeing the lore being used in a game / book. I’m creative. Probably more creative than I am analytic.

To get into the projects I have in mind and my level of attachment to them are as follows:

A class based multiplayer mod. It’s closely linked to Aliens vs. Predator clone than what some people might have assumed as being a Team Fortress 2 clone. The only attachment I have to it, is that I’ve enjoyed AvP 2, _Not the recent version created lately_. Natural selection seems like the closest there is, but I haven’t played that. I liked the different classes offered by AvP and would usually pick the settings such that it restricted the weapons. Being that the game is ancient now, I’ve longed for a replacement that including races that cloaked, races that were melee and climbed walls, and your stock race with guns. So if someone were to make a game that felt like the old AvP with a new look, I could probably drop this idea quickly. It might be better to just wait for a true AvP clone to arise than make this myself.

Aenteroph Chronicles. I don’t remember how this started. But for quite some time, I spent a lot of my waking hours dreaming up the world and how things worked. I’d have to say that I’d also be deeply saddened should this ever go. I keep thinking that this was simply supposed to be a simple one off story that was going to give me the experience I needed to make more involved games later on. It also might have been my attempt at thinking up another fantasy MMO that was based on the rules that I wanted to see in the game, as I’ve already thought up the sci-fi mmo for the Legacies lore. After many nights thinking up things to put into this fantasy world, I ended up with about 10-15 stories that I could make out of this.

Last but not least is the Legacies science fiction universe. This is by far my oldest creations and I would probably be devastated the most by the loss of this one should I let it disappear. It’s over 15 years old and very few people have seen it. I’ve likely held on to it as I wanted it to be the masterpiece of my creations. That it’s solid in it’s story and lore. A deep and rich experience. It’s come a long way and I remember a lot of what I put into it and what was cut. Being sci-fi, it was inspired by many of the sci-fi stories out there: Star Wars, Space Above and Beyond, Star Trek, etc. At one point I had to stop looking at other movies and stories as I had noticed that my creations were a little too familiar. I didn’t have wookies, I had large… hairy… sasquatch—-like…. There was no force, or light sabers… they just used swords… that may or may not have glowed. Desert people that looked like Kardasians. Ugly faced war lovers…. _sigh_. Then it all got an overhaul… then again and again. I’m glad to say that now it is very close to what I envision it. That it looks different and no longer a spinoff of something already existing. There is no force. Melee weapons are for primatives. Lines often blur between good and evil.

 

So the question now is, what do I do with them? Put them on the side and not think about them for a while? Let them die? Ignore everything and continue full force in them?

Part of the question, reaches back to the android app I made. If I do get around to making it, will people even like it? Enough that warrants me making more (financially or not).

Or do i make it, but for myself first? Even if nobody else likes it. Would I like it then?

At the very least, I might sideline these and try just writing them myself.

The Dream Graveyard

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I’ve been programming for what I would consider a while. First, lets visit the past. Let me tell you what I’ve worked on you don’t think that I tried one thing and gave up.

I don’t know how many websites I’ve created before. Plenty of unique and plenty of ugly by today’s standards websites. I was never strongly determined to go into flash, so I tried one thing there and then settled on server side scripting, html and JavaScript… then later on with CSS. I list websites as it’s pretty much the first thing I did. Lots and lots of pointless websites. All just for myself that served no purpose other than to try and make a cool design. Am I sad to see these go? Not one bit.

Themis. My first first major server side script. I put a fair bit of time into this, but it didn’t really have a hold on me. Just something I spent a lot of time on. It helped me get a good understanding of what kind of security works and what doesn’t. Then better solutions came around and I let it turn to dust. No one used it. No one knew of it. I don’t think even I used it. Always in a alpha or beta state with nothing else that used it. It was back in the day when I wanted to do everything myself instead of using libraries. Although I’m sure that libraries were hard to come by at the time.

Hermes. My second script. This one had much more gumption. Now that I think of it… I do think Themis was used for this. Hermes was my webmail client. Also during the time that I did everything myself. In this case… I did have other things before. I tried hotmail, thunderbird and eventually a site call blue…. blue something-or-other. Spam was bad and this solution seemed to get rid of most of it. It used a unique (to me) method to ask anyone who emailed me to whitelist themselves by clicking a link on every reply. This way you could cause yourself to go to the inbox so long as you had a valid email, instead of landing in the spam folder. The service itself’s uptime is what caused me to then make this script. It mirrored much of the functionality and was quite lite-weight. After 2-3 years, I eventually retired it as it got too troublesome to maintain for just myself. Then finally, at Google Mail… I’m happy. Am I sad to see this one go? Perhaps, but like Old Yeller, it was just time…

iKonquest. My third major script. This time, I wanted to see a multiplayer version of a game i had great fun with on the KDE version of linux…. Galactic Conquest. or Konquest. It had more to do with strategy than it did luck which is why I liked it… Simple to learn, hard to master. I set out to create the game and eventually I did. It had a small following, but bugs eventually killed it. My attention soon helped the demise of this game and eventually it was gone. Sad to leave, a little.

Facebook Game. A victim of feature creeping. I failed to realize how large the game could get and ultimately abandoned it. Sad to leave? A little yes.

Maelori. A java game that I worked on with a team, reason for ending, unspoken, and it’s end was unfortunate.

Android App: Scoundrel’s Cross. This app, I even invested in. Took me about a two months to get in a workable state, and another few months to finalize the content. It was the first true app completed to the level it was intended to be released in. A part 1 of 4 series. Unfortunately, I’m no businessman or marketer and that ultimately killed any future for this app as a good portion of it was riding on the artwork. Without artwork, it would look unfinished and the poor sales killed any ambition to move forward. In the end, I released the source code for the app and made what i did release, free. (I refunded all who purchased as part of the original promise was that they were going to get the full game as it was released. The right thing to do was to refund all who purchased to date… which wasn’t that many.). Sad to leave? Very. My first app, in a universe I’ve spend years developing. A big slap in the face and one that made me question if I should continue doing this. More on that in the next post.
Note: The website for this app was quickly made and ironically wasn’t intended to be viewed initially in a mobile device. With the death of the app, there’s very little ambition to make it so.

That’s the apps I’ve created to date. There’s probably others but none that I can remember… so they didn’t hold a part of me when they died.

The First Of Many

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Today is the first post, of hopefully many. This category is about myself as a discouraged developer, although it’s not when I first became discouraged, but rather the start of when I decided to write it down. I’m sure I’m not alone in being discouraged, and I’m sure there are others that feel worse off, but this blog is about the person I can relate to the most. It is also about the only person I should compare myself to. Me.

Circumstances fall differently on others, and I should not be quick to envy them. My life is about me, and how I deal with it. Yours is about you. There are too many unknowns and differences of opinions for me to compare myself to you. If I seem like a walking contradiction or hypocrite, it is likely because I’m having trouble articulating what I actually mean. Or perhaps I don’t really know what I want myself. Opinions and desires, if not strongly rooted in something can switch on a dime. And this area of my life is definitely shallow rooted. At least that’s what it appears to me to be like.

 

This “category” on my site will tell the true tale of how I go about my life in regards to development, programming code that is. I took it in college and got a job coding. It’s what I do best. Lately, I’ve second guessed my work, or triple guessed it. I’ve doubted my dreams and even contemplated giving them up. One particular post I’ve read suggested that doing so would open the door for depression. I guess it depends on the level of dedication or how strongly you are attached to your dream(s). In my case it is strong.

In the past day or so, after much contemplating on giving up my dreams, I decided to start this Discouraged Developer Journal. Either it will tell the tale of a discouraged developer who never gave up on his dream and ultimately accomplished them, or pose as a warning to those who can spot the signs they need to avoid the doomed path I follow.

* To anyone who reads this, be prepared for a rambling, scatter brained journal entries as I work out my thoughts. There maybe large gaps between posts, or so frequent as to (witty one-liner).