Motivations for Programming

Posted by Jacob Santos on September 24, 2011

My motivation for programming the Minecraft Proxy will probably come when 1.9 comes out and I blow away my world. As long as I spent on that world, I’m not going to have a lot of motivation unless I have some intelligent helpers. I’ll probably be spending some couple of months working on the project. I keep itching to do the networking code and seeing how well that is handled.

Motivation for programming Python is also high. I have a project I wanted to have completed by the end of this weekend and I haven’t even started. I still think I can complete it, but the code will be sloppy, most likely needing rewrites and well, it will need to be rewritten anyway. I’m thinking about taking the Projile project in stages. I’m also thinking of developing my own framework starting with the controller, but leaving the models and views to third-party libraries. The controller will probably take a week or two, depending on how well the initial code is developed and what existing framework I want to closely match.

My goals for the Python Controller Framework is similar to the Minecraft Proxy. I’m not going to focus on programming either project the “correct” way given the idioms of the programming languages. The code most likely will be developed similar to the patterns I’ve learned from PHP and Java. Which probably won’t be all that bad. I’m going to take “Mythical Man-Month” approach and toss the first implementation as not really a prototype, but an solution that will hopefully lead to a better working solution. Similar to the Projile project itself.

The goal for the Framework is to create a configuration-less Controller framework that handles installation, upgrading, plugins and authentication. The authentication I want to support many different OpenID services and probably will write a Facebook Python framework, unless one doesn’t already exists and is on par to what I’m looking for. I’ll probably write one anyway, since I want to learn the inner workings of Facebook Open Graph or whatever the public API is called.

From my readings of Pragmatic Programmer and “Your Brain at Work”, it seems that the best way to be motivated for a project is to take it in steps. To focus on an achievable goal and work towards it. In the case of Pragmatic Programmer, if you find that the goal is not exactly what you’ve been looking for, then maybe the entire solution wasn’t great in the first place and not much is lost.

The other part of this is to develop components that are separate. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that with the Minecraft Proxy in D. The Java code is… not exactly decoupled and I doubt the D code will be either. I’m thinking the Python framework code will be decoupled enough to start work and should be able to be refactored to its separate components.

Of course, while thinking about doing this, I should just be doing it. The problem is that the more I think about the project and why I’m not doing the projects the better the solutions. Another demotivating part is sucking at design and usability. Even with the books I’ve been reading, it is still extremely difficult. Of course, I haven’t actually read any basic design books. That will be my next stop. I think I’ve had enough of the basics of usability and need to focus on design. Once this roadblock is dealt with, I’ll hopefully be more willing to focus on this project.

It is holding up long term projects, which is further motivating me to want to start working on it. I keep thinking more and more about the farmer sim browser game and how fun it would be to finally be able to play it. The kinds of stuff I want to do! Regardless, I’m kind of hoping Projile will be the foundation for developing the games and learning better programming and usability.

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