Archives on Ideas on Software Engineering

Staying Motivated on Side Projects

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have worked on many different side projects, open source libraries and user facing services/products. While working on these projects, I have found that I sometimes struggle with staying motivated, particularly with the user facing products. I have several completed open source libraries published on GitHub, including Motif, process-warden, dagger-servlet.

My friend Nic and I started a new user facing side project this year, and I took some time for a retrospective look at our past user facing side projects prior to starting. We made some adjustments to how we went about the work that needed to be done, and it has been a success. This is the first side project that I recovered from a motivation slump and continued working on the project with a renewed vigor.

Looking back, it seemed like on past projects the biggest motivation struggle for me was that we started with what I would describe as the “fun” partb followed by the more business-oriented tasks. We would start by focusing on the actual idea, be it a mobile app or a backing service. Once the idea itself was implemented, we would start work on the other necessary tasks like user registration/authentication and marketing that must be done to launch a product. While I do still find these tasks interesting and valuable to learn, I struggle more when I run into a roadblock with these. If the roadblock takes a long time to resolve, I eventually lose motivation, and will take a break from the project. I’ve never recovered from one of these motivation slumps because I know when I begin working on the project I have the same set of tasks to accomplish; there is no proverbial carrot on a stick for me.

This time, we decided to take a different approach. We put the implementation of the idea itself on the back burner and immediately focused on the more business oriented tasks. We began with implementing user registration/authentication. Next, we began working/researching marketing and setting up a pre-launch landing page for beta testers. I hit a motivation slump during September, largely due to the start of Diablo III Season 4. The slump continued a couple weeks beyond when I stopped playing Diablo, but eventually my motivation returned and we kept working toward our goals. Keeping the “fun” work as a carrot on a stick has made a huge difference for me, and I will continue to approach future projects in the same way.

Another advantage of approaching the project this way is that we actually finished the implementation of user registration/authentication, and we can split that out into a reusable component that we can use in future projects. We will no longer have to try to implement that for each project we start.

Our project is called Geolode. It is a service that mobile app developers can use to provide geo-location based user interactions within their apps. This allows app developers to provide very powerful and useful features to their users without having to focus on the development of all of the server side for geo-location based queries. The app developers can focus on what they know best, and we will focus on what we know best.

We have our initial landing page up at http://geo.lodeup.com. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester or even an alpha tester, check it out and sign up for early access. You can also follow project blog at http://engineering.lodeup.com.

Drumming as Exercise Routine

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:00:27 +0000

I wanted to get into a regular exercise routine, but I have a really hard time getting into a routine doing something I really don’t enjoy. In the past I’ve tried to get into running on my treadmill. Running on the treadmill is really hard for me – my mind starts to wander and I get utterly bored after only a few minutes. Even with music or Netflix to distract me while I run, I just can’t do it. My attempts to get into a running routine typically last around one week. I have decided to run an experiment of drumming as exercise routine, and see what happens. I have a lot of respect for people with the discipline to keep up an exercise routine.

Before I go into more detail about the drumming as exercise routine, first a little history. I got to thinking about how I was able to stay in shape during college. I never made any point to exercise in college and the food I ate was by no means healthy. Most of my time in college, I also drank Coke as my main liquid, drinking almost no water. I probably had a higher metabolism while in college, which contributed to staying in decent shape. I also played a lot of guitar hero and later Rock Band. Guitar Hero certainly isn’t going to burn as many calories as running or cycling, but standing for hours on end, on a daily basis, certainly burns more calories than sitting and watching TV or playing on the computer. The calorie burning was kicked up a notch when Rock Band was released in 2007 and I moved on to playing Rock Band drums for hours on end.

When Harmonix released Rock Band, I already owned an electronic drum set. With the help of the Rock Band forum community, we figured out a way to rig up a midi module with outputs soldered to the Rock Band drums so that we could play Rock Band with a real electronic drum set. With the upgrade to a real drum set, I was playing hours of drums everyday for the last semester and a half of college. I think the full drum set experience made a big difference toward staying in shape.

After college I continued to play drums on a fairly regular basis for a couple of years, but I eventually slowed down and completely stopped. Shortly before Thanksgiving last year I started to think about drumming again for exercise. I started by doing some Google searches in hopes to find some evidence that drumming is decent exercise. I found a lot of typical forum posts with people arguing back and forth, but to my surprise I found an actual scientific study, done by the University of Gloucestershire and the University of Chichester. A lot of the technical details of the study are available on the Clem Burke Drumming Project website, and the BBC also have an interesting article about the study indicating that professional drummers burn between 400 and 600 calories an hour.

Based on the research and my desire to exercise again I decided to start up a regular drumming routine again. Yes, I’m playing Rock Band 3 when I’m exercising, but I’m doing so on a real electronic drum set, and I choose songs mostly from the Nightmare/Impossible difficulty level. I’m definitely not burning 400-600 calories an hour, but I’d guess I’m burning somewhere between 150-300 calories per session. My goal is to play for 45 minutes or more at least 3 days a week. It’s been almost two months since I started and so far I have lived up to this goal. On the weekends I sometimes find myself playing 2 hour sessions.

Generally I create a playlist of 10 songs and start rocking out. By picking the songs ahead of time and creating a playlist it creates the smallest amount of downtime between songs; this way my heart rates stays elevated throughout the play session. I’m not any good at measuring my heart rate, but it is definitely elevated while drumming (though not nearly as much as when I run). I hope to get a digital heart rate monitor, so that I can get a better idea of my heart rate while playing, and at least make some back of the envelope calculations on how many calories I’m burning.

Around the same time I started my drumming exercise routine my girlfriend started a more traditional exercise routine. We have turned it in to a little competition. We are both going to continue with our separate exercise routines and in May we are going to run a 5K. We will determine which exercise routine is better based on who finishes first. Realistically both exercise routines are good, but it’s always fun to add a little competition as additional motivation.

Blogging is Hard

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 22:55:03 +0000

I have decided to give blogging another go. Over the years I have tried to get into blogging on varying topics including music and philosophy. This will be my personal blog, with no specific topic, other than whatever random things enter my head. To keep the blog going, I will make it my goal to create at least one new blog entry a month. Upcoming post topics will likely include Pusher (specifically from a Java consumer standpoint) and my current exercise regimen.