After reaching 1.0 of Lobaco I’ve taken a breather from developing it, mostly so I could catch up on my backlog of games and give my brain a well deserved break from working on that problem space. It’s not that I’m tired of the idea, I still think it has merit, but the last 6 months of little free time on the nights and weekends were starting to catch up with me and a break is always a good way to kick start my motivation. It didn’t take long for numerous new ideas to start popping into my head afterwards and instead of jumping back into Lobaco development I thought I’d cut my teeth on another, simple project that would give me the experience I needed to migrate Lobaco into the cloud.
The weekend before last I started experimenting with ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft’s web framework that based on the model-view-controller pattern that I had become familiar with after deep diving into Objective-C. I could have easily done this project in Silverlight but I thought that I’d have to man up sooner or later and learn a proper web language otherwise I’d be stuck in my desktop developer paradigm for good. The results weren’t spectacular and I could only bring myself to spend about half the time I usually do coding on the new site, but there was progress made there none the less.
Last weekend was more productive with me managing to make the site look something like the vision I had in my head. Satisfied that I could design a decent looking website I decided to start hacking away at the core fundamentals of the application. This is where I rubbed up against the limitations of the framework that I had chosen for this particular project, not knowing that whilst ASP.NET MVC might share most of its name with its ASP.NET cousins it is in fact a world away from it. Sure it’s still extremely capable but it’s nothing like the drag and drop framework that I had been used to with other Microsoft products, leaving me to research pure HTML and Javascript solutions, something which I had avoided like the plague in the past. This meant that progress was pretty slow and the temptation to play Starcraft 2 with a bunch of my good mates was too strong and I left it there for the weekend.
The slow progress really frustrated me. After finally gaining competence with Objective-C I felt like learning yet another new framework would be easy, even if it meant learning another language. Somehow I managed to forget that frustrating first month where progress was almost nil and I convinced myself I wasn’t procrastinating when looking for other solutions to my problems. Eventually I came to the realization that I was still grokking the new framework I had chosen for my application and that I shouldn’t be expecting myself to be blazing trails when I was still establishing my base of fundamental knowledge.
I see lots of people go through the same struggle when trying out new things and can see how easy it is to give up when you’re not making the kinds of progress other people are. Believe me its even worse in the tech/start-up area where every other day I’m reading about someone who hacked together a fully usable service in a weekend whilst I struggle to get my page to look like it wasn’t written in notepad. The realization that you’re still in the grok stage of learning something new I find to be quite a powerful motivator as past experience has shown that it’s only a matter of time and persistence between floundering around and becoming quite capable.
I’m usually the first one to tell people to stick with what they know as re-skilling is extremely expensive time wise (and can be $$$ wise too, Objective-C set me back a few large) but the pay-offs of diversifying you skills can be quite large. Whilst I’ve yet to make any semblance of a dollar from all my adventures in iPhone development I still count it as a valuable experience, if for the mere fact it’s given me a lot of perspective and oodles of delicious blog fodder. Time will tell if this current foray into yet another web framework will be worth my time but I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought there was no chance of it ever paying off.
