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1 Jul 23, 2006 02:09    

I'm asking myself once again, what is the point of doing any unpaid program development?

In 2-3 years all I have to show is lots of unfinished projects.

And for the b2evolution projects, it just seems that i cannot keep up anymore.

I started lightality, then Phoenix came out, then i worked on it again, then 1.8 started, and so on.

It seems that i am always playing catchup, or the things that I do plan to develop, will just get done anyway or become useless.

With the Gallery Plugin, it's had about 100 downloads, all feedback has been positive. But i'm expected to put all this time into these things, for a pat on the back.

Yeh, i'm running dry on motivation.

So what keeps you developing? Or even, what keeps you posting?

2 Jul 23, 2006 03:09

/me gives balupton a pat on the back.

I don't use the gallery plugin, but have benefited from your posts.

Sometimes the unseen unfelt rewards are the best.

Anyway, you do it cuz ya like to do it, kinda like fishing, or skiing. No reward, but it's fun.

3 Jul 23, 2006 03:31

mrdav wrote:

Anyway, you do it cuz ya like to do it, kinda like fishing, or skiing. No reward, but it's fun.

Ayuh. I do whatever it is I do because I want to. When someone says "well done" that's cool, but it's not the driving force. Like for example I'm putting a heck of a lot of time into tweaking old skins to work with the 1.8 release. My name and link won't be in them because all I'm doing is updating someone else's work. "Because I want to" is the motivator on that project.

Except work: I do that for money. That's why they call it work eh? And pay bills, though I want to live indoors and have water and electricity with a big giant truck outside and cool hang gliding toys inside, so maybe I pay bills because I want to. hmmm...

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balupton may I suggest trimming your project list to only the items you *want* to do? Never mind why you would pick up this and drop that: if it's not it's own reward then drop it. Such is life in the free open source world eh?

4 Jul 23, 2006 10:22

balupton may I suggest trimming your project list to only the items you *want* to do? Never mind why you would pick up this and drop that: if it's not it's own reward then drop it. Such is life in the free open source world eh?

Sort of says it all. [URL=http://www.shauninman.com/plete/]Shaun Inman[/URL] started developing an excellent stats package that was/is free. He focused on it, upgraded it, added to it and now sells the upgraded package [URL=http://www.haveamint.com/]HaveaMint[/URL] for $30 a site with full support
It sells like hot cakes and he is respected even more than he was before the release.

5 Jul 24, 2006 00:41

balupton wrote:

But like getting things to work in IE6, documenting things, following standards, they're all things that really suck. But they are things that 'need' to be done.... You just can't say, screw it, i'm only gonna do the things i like to do, and ignore the rest....

True. I guess what I end up doing is accepting that if I want to do 'foo' then I pretty much have to commit to 'bar' as well. If 'bar' is more than I'm willing to embrace then I accept that 'foo' isn't going to be worth it - to me.

EXAMPLE: I made up a hack a long time ago that I called my bobobox hack. It worked extremely well at stopping comment spam. Like NONE, and all I asked the visitor to do was type in the word I told them to type in. If they ate my visitor cookie they didn't need to type the word when they came back. Fine, but I never released that hack to the world because I didn't feel it would be fun to make it be 'worthy'. I figured if it wasn't unique to each installation and back-office customizable it wasn't a good hack, so it never went out. A year or so later I changed my mind and made up my "simple turing test" hack. That hack can probably be a plugin now but I haven't gone anywhere near doing it. The "funky field names" stops a lot of spammers. Not all, but a lot, and there are other things I feel like doing first.

balupton wrote:

Well all the projects i start, i want to do.... But sometimes i just can't be bothered finishing them.

You and me both! If I tried to list all the groovy ideas I wanted to do and started working on I'd crash the forum server 8| I figure if I publicly commit then give up I should publicly say "I give up on this" and let someone else run with it if they want. If no one wants to say "I'll try that" then I guess it didn't matter. That's why it's best to not tell anyone what you're trying to do. That way when it gets old and boring you can just bag it and no one has to know it died ;)


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