Done

Something I've noticed is my tendency to over-focus on getting something done. I've often spent a long time working on something in private with the goal of getting it to the done stage: a point where I'd be happy to put it out in public and let the world have at it. I've previously noted that this leads to long feedback loops and performance anxiety. In addition, waiting until something is done can take an unnecessarily long amount of time, and deprives other people of the opportunity to judge for themselves whether what you're doing is good enough for them.

Those are all problems on the way to done, but the biggest one is on the other side: what next? Sometimes you may have the benefit of a project that you throw over the wall and never have to touch again, but usually getting it done is just the beginning. To get people to care about a project is a whole new task that really has very little to do with how done it is. And what if you're not as oracular as you imagined, and your beautiful done thing actually still needs some work? Are you going to do that work if, to you, it is the essence of completeness?

So I am learning to be happier with projects that aren't done. In that spirit, here is something I have been sitting on for way too long: Robot Party. It is a kind of mash-up of actor-model programming and IRC, with the goal of making a kind of virtual space where people and code can both exist as tangible things. The gory details are in the code, but I'll do a better writeup later.

You're welcome to get in contact if it's something you'd be interested in getting involved with. It's definitely not done, but perhaps it's done enough.