EPTBut seriously, first and foremost, being burned out on a project is the hardest to deal with. After pushing so hard for such a long period of time, I really killed myself on energy and passion. I look at my projects and plans for getting involved, see that they're doing reasonably alright, and find myself thinking, "Eh, I'll just take a bit of a break now and pick it up next week". That's fine every now and then, but week after week? That's a problem. I really think that the holidays helped though - gave me a legit excuse not to work on stuff and just.. well... not really do anything. :/
Now, being a little burned out is bad, but it's made so much worse when something else is going on that is distracting you, and right now there are a few distracting things dancing around in my head. A combination of some personal and job related stuff. (By the way, for a real job, I do web development for a firm in San Francisco. SolutionSet if you must know). Now, these issues are petty, and shouldn't really be all that distracting, but when you're burned out, they're more distracting, so we have this cycle of being burned-out making distractions easier, which makes it harder to get unburned-out, which makes the distractions all the more alluring, etc.
In the last few days, I've started picking things back up, forcing myself to work on things, and that's been helping, but as I talk about the future of SC2Ratings with my team/staff/friends-of-sc2ratings, the complexity of the project and the sheer volume of work ahead of me is overwhelming.
For example, here's my to-do list for just one feature we're trying to add - User reviews of matches with comments.
1) Build back end of reviews
a) input
b) edit
c) limitations
d) errors
2) Build front end of reviews
a) input form (I'm this far)
b) output page
3) Build back end of review comments
a) input
b) edit
c) limitations
d) errors
4) Build front end of review comments
a) input form
b) output page
5) Build back end of moderation
a) input on moderation request
b) limitations on moderation request
c) errors on moderation request
d) notifications via page
e) admin approve or deny
f) limitations on admin approve/deny
g) errors on admin approve or deny
h) notifications via email
6) Build front end of moderation
a) user input form
b) moderator notifications / moderation pages.
7) Build back end for rating reviews
a) tables
b) input
8) Build back end for rating comments
a) tables
b) input
9) build front end for rating comments & reviews
a) images
10) Integrate front end of these aspects with what we have now
a) links & javascript
Oh, and then we have too take ratings on comments and reviews and use them as point rewards for users - and then play the fun meta game of "How to assign points in a way to reward the sort of behavior we want to encourage, but still make ensure that the system can't be gamed by people trying to accrue reputation without having done anything useful".
Then we also have tags we're adding to matches, which is going to be similar in size to the above list. Maybe more complicated.
And this is just SC2Ratings. I'm also still trying to get involved in other ways, which has been daunting recently. Luckily SirScoots & TheGunrun are awesome, friendly guys, which has been helping with my crushing shyness and social paranoia. Doesn't help me get involved directly, but it makes it feel less impossible. (God I sound like a pansy)
So, lets just say, it's been rough lately. In fact, the only reason I'm writing this blog article is because I'm staring at my IDE (What developer use to write code. I'm using Aptana) and can't muster the willpower to start on the next chunk of code.
And now I don't want to end this, because then I'll have to go back to coding.
Suck it up! Go write something! Build the output form for reviews damn it! It's not that hard. Grrr.
- Koibu
Sorry for typos.
