Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Brick Walls Cause Serious Swelling

I have two nasty welts right now. Okay, so they're not physical manifestations, but I am in real pain.

Weekends are my productive periods. I don't always have contiguous hours during the week to invest in my new venture because I still have a real job. It's incredibly painful when I hit a wall that stops me from doing what I want to do. I had plans for this weekend. I was going to quickly finish implementing an enhanced save routine for my application (by end of evening on Friday), take my newly designed company logo and get a first version of my web site running (half a day on Saturday) and round out the weekend by adding at least one of the two remaining features in my program. By Monday morning I was going to have a nearly feature complete program and a website.

CRASH! My first wall was a bug in my code. I blew most of the weekend on it until I figured out what to ask of the gurus that hang out on Apple's cocoa-dev mailing list. Luckily these people are well-versed in helping Cocoa newbies like me and I had a solution posted for me within minutes.

SLAM!!! The second hit had to do with my company logo. I've outsourced the creation of this logo and spent a huge budget of $150 (huge is obviously a relative term) on it. The group I have doing it may end up giving me a wonderful logo, but my first two rounds with the process have not been as on target as I wanted. I get four revisions for my big bucks, so I'll reserve final judgment until I get to the end of the process. I'll give out the name of the website if they do a good job.

I know the logo is not critical for the success of the company, so I am trying to keep it in perspective. I'd just like to fit the look of my website around the look of the logo, which means, I didn't do anything on the website this weekend.

The good news is that I'm back to making progress on the program. I'm also a bit more confident about my understanding of the Cocoa Frameworks after (correctly) responding to a poster on the Apple list. It's good to give as well as take knowledge.

So after stepping back a few paces, I can see the walls are more like tall curbs and I've merely stubbed my ego a couple of times. I'll survive to continue to fight the good fight.