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The last month has been quite busy, and the only signs of my presence in Gemini space have been SpellBinding, Wordo, and the continual watering of my plant in AstroBotany.
Timothy, the common noxious rainbow palm
Last Saturday I finally had some free time, so I started on another item from my to-do list: setting up my own capsule. The official motivations are to get back in practice as a sysadmin (it's been a while since I've had my own server... per my DigitalOcean activity log, it was 2017), and to experiment with CGI (I would like to write a Wordo knockoff with a German word list). But it would also be nice to have a gemlog that lets me tag posts with the date in US Eastern time instead of UTC, which is always off by one at the time of day that I gemlog. ;-)
My first attempt to set up a Gemini server used gemserv, but unfortunately cargo hung while building it. (It never finished building, and didn't emit an error message or anything... very odd.) So I fell back to Molly Brown, which was not too hard to build. I have gotten it to the "hello world" stage, which is good. Next step is to port over the content of this gemlog.
Today Sandra at idiomdrottning posted about the idea of "SOFA," or "Start Often Finish rArely."
This... is definitely my approach to side projects, whether programming, writing, or game designing. When I get an idea for a new side project and start the design work or prototype, I think "This one could have an impact. This one can be completed on a reasonable timeline. This one will be the one I finish." That's what I thought about Perez, but you can see how many commits I've made to it in the past two months.
There is a temptation to feel like I have washed out when I start these side projects and don't complete them. But it's also not like those "matter" the same way that my job, my ministry, my friendships, and my general well-being matter. In those areas, I am much more in the "GTD" camp than the "SOFA" camp.
Thinking of SOFA as "a thing" also helped me realize something about side projects: for me, the fun part is exploring the problem space and coming up with ideas. Spending a lot of time on implementing the side projects was fine when I was in university and trying to build a reputation in the open source community, but now that side projects are just for fun (and sometimes to explore a new area of knowledge), the SOFA approach is totally adequate.
I'm hoping the German Wordo clone doesn't fall into the category of unfinished projects, though... mostly because I want to play it myself.
📅 April 7, 2022
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