Progress
I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So far, most of my work has been investigating how to solve technical problems. It’s frustrating, because you inevitably choose blind alleys and it takes weeks to get nowhere.
But last week I think I overcame the last big technical risk before having useful working tools – or at least prototypes thereof. There’s still a lot of work to go before I’m at that stage, but hopefully it’s just coding rather than sinking endless time into problem solving.
(That said, I have spent most of this week looking into some pesky technical problems. But they’re of the sort where you know there’s a solution, rather than the sort where there’s a big risk there might be no way to do something, and you might have to change your plans radically).
I’ve noticed too that I’m now working longer hours. When my wife is out doing her daft cycling stuff, I’m working. I’m even waking up before the alarm goes off, which is pretty unheard of for me, and getting working. This is not because I’m massively excited, it’s just because I can enjoy the coding phase whereas the risk-uncertainty-investigation phase was fairly unpleasant.
Anyway, that’s where I am. The next few weeks could be a rollercoaster: now I’ve got the underlying technology more-or-less in place, I have to see whether I can make tools out of it which I believe could be useful.