Sometimes the Best Thing to Do Is Take a Mulligan and a Break

Despite my best intentions, I've spent a mere sixteen hours' time on the implementation of the prototype plan, and only a small portion of the work is done—much less than I'd hoped to have completed by now. In fact, the idea was to have implemented the entire prototype by tonight, but that will be impossible, and I'm turning in what I have presently rather than subject myself to even more stress by coding up to the very last second. It's been a horrible week; I badly need the weekend off.

The reason the work isn't done is partly because of an unexpected time-sink: planning a hackathon for students of the UHawaii system. Last week, my co-curator/co-host left the islands on very short notice, and the duties of planning the group's activities, designing the website, writing copy and tons of emails fell to me. This would consume a couple dozen hours, which I had hoped to use for this project, programming.

Another difficulty was coordinating the work with my partner, who through today was still working on assignment 22, installing the Makahiki framework. Having only one person working on coding the prototype (instead of two) cut in half the number of hours that could be contributed to project development, and necessitated further time together spent on environment configuration rather than the code. The good news is that we are finally very nearly on the same page.

Yet another obstacle was that the Makahiki instance I had running on Heroku mysteriously broke, and I was unable to recover what was lost. That included the work from assignment 23, in which I had setup the game to look like it belonged to KTUH (rather than the Kukui Cup).

Still another factor was the response from KTUH vis-à-vis a serious game for the station, which ranged from lukewarm to indifferent: a heck of a motivation killer. If the station's management team doesn't want a game, nor show much interest in having one handed to them, it calls into question the point of whether one should be developed at all. While Philip's class has been very motivating, running a mini-Kukui Cup (which we have proposed) is a big obligation in which the major stakeholder is KTUH. Thus, the KTUH team would have to be on board for it to be worthwhile or even possible.

For the last several days, it's as though I was in a rip-tide swimming my hardest but only staying in place. To get out of a riptide, one needs to move sidelong to the current, parallel with the shore. That's why I'm giving myself the weekend off: not to swim so hard. The design of the project doesn't need to change, as far as I can tell. The biggest obstacle that remains is understanding the framework and getting continually better at working within it. When I come back to the work on Monday, I have a good feeling that I will be able to begin making the necessary progress towards its completion, given a few hours dedicated daily to the cause. Even if the station doesn't want the game, at least I'll have a completed project I can be proud of.