20th Jun 2003
Caught A Code
It feels great to be programming again!
As I had mentioned here and there, I managed to go on a bit of detour lately with some projects that took me away from programming. I wrote an article for ONLamp.com, started the ThereThen website, went to the week-long Etech conference, and reviewed an XML book for Addison-Wesley.
All of which were great fun to do, and it’s nice to get paid to write, or to read and comment …
When I got back to my FlexiPhoto code (Apache/MySQL/PHP, with a Perl install script), it was like seeing an old familiar friend, but there was some catching up to do.
If you’re not a programmer, perhaps a writing analogy will do. Let’s say you’re in the middle of writing a book, and then you stop for a month or two. Can you just pick up where you left off? Nope! You pretty much need to look back, review, and answer the “now where was I?” question. Takes a little bit to get back in the flow. Same with programming something non-trivial. There’s still that “front and center in the mind, all details are fresh” aspect.
I’d be curious to hear from others: what is the longest amount of time you have spent away from a project, where you came back to it and were able to really get into it again? How long did it take? Did you have the urge to change things, because you were coming at it fresh (and did you fight that urge, in the interest of getting to a certain plateau first?)
I’ve got a project to get back to!
