This morning I woke up in a better mood. I was still dreading the work ahead, but with renewed energies it didn’t seem so far away. I sat down to meditate, and my thoughts kept coming back to the game, but this time it wasn’t a doubting voice, it was visual imagery solving the problems ahead, so it let imagination express itself, only coming back to the breath when imagination turned verbal.
This is something new to me, I’ve always thought I had no capacity for projection in interaction, I only end up with acceptable interactions because I fiddle endlessly in code. But what I saw was good, and though I couldn’t project too far away in the interactions, it showed me the blindspots and I opened some apps to gain insight on how to resolve them.
With this in mind I went to the library early in the morning. As I was walking I was thinking if I were my boss I would have fired my ass by now, upon further reflection I thought no, I’d quit, this boss doesn’t plan anything, and finally I chuckled at the realization: It’s the boss whom I’ll fire into oblivion.
I had solid work done today, and after implementing what I had in mind I can see this is the right solution. Not only it feels pleasant, it cleans up the codebase and it opens new possibilities for growing the product in the future. As I delete dead code I still greive all the hours I put into it, but then I use the game and it’s obvious that I came to the right solution by speding so much time doing it.
My only concern is burning out before I have an MVP. It’s been a month since I’ve taken a day off, working through Christmas and New Year’s Eve as if they were any other day. I’ve done two major reworks on the codebase, a third one and it would be game over. Fortunately my boss is being replaced by someone who insists on taking breaks and meditates upon the implications of the interactions I’m coding.
He’s starting tonight, and his first task is to define what is needed for the earliest possible MVP that will serve as a private beta for friends and family.