Monotonic

A while back I wrote about the Elo paradox, the problem caused by motivation-by-measurement: if your measurements start dropping for any reason, your motivation drops, which causes a further drop in performance. I suggested at the time that a better solution would be to measure cumulative output, which has the advantage that any additional effort is always positive; you're never working to get back to zero, just slowly adding more to the endlessly rising tide of progress.

I had been meaning to put my money where my mouth is on this front, but I've historically had trouble with personal statistics systems; nothing off the shelf works, so I basically wrote my own and, predictably, it broke at some point. However, I took a bit of time in my prototypes this week to start over and do something slightly more robust, and added an extra layer to pump selected stats from the stats system onto this site.

You can see the result on my new stats page. It's nothing fancy, but the underlying architecture should allow me to put all sorts of other stats in there as I write more plugins to collect them. Once I have a bit more data I can add some cute graphs and things, which I'm really looking forward to. I'm hopeful it will be as motivating as I hypothesised. Can you believe I've written over 100,000 words here?

The code for the underlying system should be usable by others fairly soon, it just needs a bit of cleanup to migrate its way out of my prototypes and onto GitHub & npm.