January 14th, 2008
I have a long line of unfinished projects. I like to start a new project, explore, learn and finally move on to something else before I make something visible. Sure, there is much code left, most of the time it’s reusable but i don’t really have some showcase, some folder with finished projects, with executables. Instead there is only an “Old projects” folder, some made it to the the black triangle phase and some are just an unorganized pile of code. In contrast with hobby projects, most of the past projects on my workplace are packaged and ready to run. The project life cycle is completed.
When doing hobby projects, somehow I don’t have the urge to finish them. When i learn what I wanted to learn, I feel I’m done with that project. I’m sorry now that I didn’t invest a day or two more on some projects and made some final touches. Most of them are in a half finished state where most features are almost done but aren’t visible yet. To finish them now would be too much work. They’ve been made in older versions of development environments, they use components and libraries I don’t have anymore and are written by a much worse programmer then myself – a few years younger me.
To stop this unorganized behavior and make a change for the better, I have made an effort to finish my current XNA project. I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned in this project and created the “Ball roller”, a simple showcase of all techniques encountered while studying XNA. I hope this will be just the first in a longer line of my showcased projects.