Day 164: Snail's Pace

Compared to the two-week sprint during which Browserflow went from an idea to a fully-working prototype, I feel like I’m working ridiculously slowly. During the sprint, I got several major features developed in a single day; now, fixing a few bugs seems to take just as long.

What changed?

• I’m working a lot fewer hours

  • I went from working ~12 hours a day to ~6 these days

• The features are more complex

  • It was easier to knock out a bunch of features in the beginning because they were relatively simple to implement. The things I’m working on now are more complex, but still, not so much so.

• More existing code / technical debt

  • More code = more constraints to work with. I spent a lot of yesterday refactoring the mechanism through which I run actions (e.g. clicks) on pages. That change didn’t improve existing functionality, but it’ll be easier to add more actions in the future.

The slowdown was inevitable — I knew that the pace that I was working before wasn’t sustainable, but it still feels somewhat alarming to have my output drop so significantly. I’ve also noticed a dip in motivation; it seems like getting the demo out released a lot of the energy that was driving my work.

While I’d like to make sure I don’t let things stagnate too much, I have to remember that this phase is fine, too. I’ll have periods of intense productivity and periods where things feel like they’re moving at a snail’s pace. All part of the journey!