Runt is a massive exercise for me. It's a challenge to design all the little code pieces into one coherent orthogonal sculpture. I think I might have learned something new just now.
A year ago when I was starting with Runt I had no clue how all the pieces I wanted in will work on their own let alone together. I was pretty sure that the UI will be the backbone, but was not sure what shape it should take.
Slowly I realized that I cannot build it part by part, but I have to go wide and work on multiple parts at once so I won't over- or under-engineer anything. Everything was subject-of-change. This worked well...
Partially.
And that's the problem.
I now have myriads of things with variable complexity, none of which is quite usable. Everything lacks polish and little quality-of-life things. When you add feature at one spot, other missing features are that much pronounced.
The more work I do, the longer the to-do list gets.
And I no longer get my motivation from how awesome the entire thing is.
Thinking about it for a week, I now realized it's the planning that has to change. It's so embarrassingly obvious:
I need to focus on each part separately:
- I shall never be distracted by lack of polish in parts outside of my current goal.
- I shall not change my goal until the part adds value to my daily work.
- I shall get pleasure from sharing how awesome it is.
So there.