I’m sitting at a hostel in Barcelona, waiting for my phone to charge. In a while I’m leaving for the beach, and since I didn’t have much to do I decided to write my work log, which I have left on pause during some days.
The only reason I’ve foregone writing work logs is because I’ve been connecting from semi-public wifi’s with draconian firewalls, and they don’t recognize the domain where write.now is hosted. I’ve grown so fond of the product that I refuse to write my work logs anywhere else. It’ll become public in a month or so, and though I’m sure it wont make a big splash when it’s released, it may grow on some people as it has grown on me. Working with René has been a pleasure, and I notice it has made me more open towards all kinds of collaboration.
The past few days were mostly spent on preparing a presentation for a client. Again, I find myself bemoaning so much time invested towards steering the client towards the right choices. But in the end I could see it was effective, a client is rarely a single person but a group of individuals with different goals, and preparing things this way allows them to align themselves internally towards a single goal.
In the presentation to the client I was reminded of some feelings I felt when I was programming the Boolean Game: never diss other people’s work. You don’t understand the constraints they faced. Shipping anything is a damn miracle. People put their best effort given their personal and professional circumstances. I’ve seen evidence of deliberate sloppiness only on people who have come to hate their job and lash out their resentment in their work. As Khalil Gibran writes:
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
Time to hit the beach.