guod.net

I've made a discovery that I think is appropriate to share here. It's especially fitting that I'm writing about it on my blog, as I made this discovery while working on the code that runs my blog. So here's what I've found: by tracking my own progress on personal projects, I am more efficient and less likely to drift away from them before they're finished. This might not sound like a lot to those of you who live in your mom's basement and don't see the sun for 13 days at a time while you're debugging the kernel of your favorite opensource operating system. But for guys like me, who get about an hour or two of personal computing time max per day, anything we can do to make ourselves more efficient is worth trying.

The way I've been tracking my progress lately is using subversion. It's the first time I've actually held myself accountable with a version control system, despite numerous attempts through college and my first couple of jobs. Back then, rcs was too simple and cvs was too complex (and Doug was too lazy). A little while ago, I finally mustered the ambition and set aside enough free time to read most of the important chapters of the subversion book. I then set about importing the code from this blog into my first repository. Since that day, any changes I've made to the code base have been committed to the repository with a relevant change description. And that has made all the difference.

A lot of nights I would normally walk away from my computer feeling like I just didn't get enough done, or there was just too much left that I hadn't even begun to accomplish anything. But now, thanks to svn, I don't feel like that anymore. Every night that I make a commit, I have proof that I did something and that my project moved forward. As an added bonus, this mode of working keeps me focused on small, achievable goals. I don't get lost in the usual daydreams of massively impressive features that would take many man-months to implement.