Tools:project tracking and the doctrine of cold start

The idea of lone wolf hacking away in the darkness of the dungeon slowly falls apart in a few weeks at the most. Writing your hobby code is no where glamorous.

Even if you are not as bad as myself,a self declared blue-moon start-and-stop brogrammer, it will definitely happen that you will shelve what ever you are doing and come back later to it again.

This is where a version control system really comes in handy. But the issue is that most of the times you will leave when even your ideas have not completely blossomed into code.

So more than version control, a project tracker which can track status of action items and hold action items under a group representing a single idea is very important.

For example, the project which brought me back from the dead is nearly two years old. I did have a skeleton proof of concept ready in last December and showed it to a few folks. I again started on it in April for nearly two weeks.

In this scenario only way to keep track of what is happening is to religiously document your ideas. The generic idea is that you should be able to pick up the threads within a day or two and get started with whatever you were doing.

This means just like any big organization, you should also treat your self as a cog in a machine. You should always leave things at a place where it can be hydrated with minimum efforts and restarted again.

I have been trying options like Asana, and Trello and I will definitely recommend giving these a whirl. both are pretty good and I remember that their being mobile based can also be deciding point for a few who happen to read this.

But for me, tying things to code and iterations was the most essential part I was looking at. And it leads me (again) to Visual Studio Online. You can really manage your work withing sprints and have a meaningful product backlog. May be it is me but I have always enjoyed the scrum meetings of one where I report progress to myself and then raise questions and answer them myself.

In this particular case, I just started with the pending and planned items in the product backlog and slowly things started making sense. I was almost able to hit the ground running. I am not at a place where I can add more items to the overall product backlog and hopefully when I get back to this the next time, I would start from a newer baseline :D

Let's talk about the dev and deployment environments in next few days !!! I was not doing much for balancing their mutability but that is the next piece of puzzle that needs to fall in place if you really need to follow the doctrine of cold-start. 

Tools:Version Control:Open Kimono

The most important thing in open source culture is the concept of "Open Kimono".
You need to show your real self, what you are with out any inhibitions. While I agree in principle to this, the thing that I want is control over when I "open my kimono" (sheesh!!)

And I need a public repository which gives me a chance to do it. And of course I want it without having to pay for it.

Github is definitely the first choice as every one who is some one is contributing there. And if I get there, I will definitely release the final version of the things that I am trying out there.

 But it does not at this point  have a free private repository, and I desperately need it

I am known to crash the machines and disks irrespective of the code that I am planning to write. So I also need a repository where I just keep my temporary changes and use it to sync code on different machines and even at different location.

Because of this, Visual Studio is definitely the choice of Version Control for me.

(Disclosure: My previous job with Microsoft I had a chance of working with Visual Studio team. And I am intimately aware of how things are designed and they work. So there is going to be some subconscious bias towards it).

But it solves most of my issues and also has some benefits rarely found in other solutions. So Visual Studio Online it is.
In further posts I will try and get to other issues I want to fix on my hobby coding project (also known as my secret plan to take over the world) and how I got around to solving those.

If while surfing the dark bowels of the webs, you hit this spot and have some opinion - expert or otherwise - feel free to share it.

A speed breaker early is the best measure of level of interest and investment ...

And in my case this is UBUNTU system updater.

Usual week end scenario: I turn on machine and boot to UBUNTU. It boots urgently, almost expectant and eager after a week of booting to windows. After kicking face the face-book habit- (semi permanently as of  now - more on it later - same place, some date) -I have the weekend stretching in front of me and some old ideas jumping around my head. And of course they are world-changing, at least changing the face of computing as it is known today- whose ideas are not :).

And there it is, my nemesis, pops up. As if it is suffering from the same OCD which drives me towards it. This is the Software Updater. Which has week long stash of updates for me. Takes its own sweet 2 to 3 hours to get things in shape. The only significant thing I can do till it is done is open a browser and see what the world is up to. And whether facebook or not, that is still a rabbit hole. and a rabbit hole I have not yet found the other side of.

The conclusion is that this is yet another plant where I am forced to test my actual interest in the thing that I am trying to do. This is yet another gauntlet thrown in a long running tussle and I need to find a way around it.

And though at the end I burn a couple of hours, I am still happy as this is proof that I am at level 2 in the super hit game "me against me", and I have a winning card up my sleeve - disable the popup :D

P.S. Nemesis :)