So there I was, completely stalled on QubeKwest for roughly seven months. Sure, I thought about it from time to time, but that never managed to inspire me to actually work on it. Naturally that means that thinking about it tended to make me a little sad. The cycle continued and the project languished.
Then a couple of interesting things happened. I started to realize that part of the reason I was never working on QubeKwest was that I would come home from my normal job and not be able to find the motivation. I even mentioned that in one of the previous posts on this blog so it was clearly something I was aware of at least subconsciously. A few things happened at work that made me blindingly unhappy with the company I was working for and it hit me like a ton of bricks. My job was making me miserable.
There are a couple of paths you can choose to follow when you make a realization like that. You can complain about it, a lot, to everyone that will listen. This approach tends to not make anyone any happier. You aren’t solving anything by grumbling and your friends get sick of hearing about it. This path tends to be the one used early on before you realize the depth of the problem you are complaining about.
The second approach is to do something about it. This way is hard. At least partially because change is hard and not many people (myself included) like change much. It is however the only way to actually solve anything. My eventual solution was to find a new job. This didn’t immediately provide me more time to code QubeKwest, but it did immediately improve my general happiness.
Now, as a happier guy in a new job, I still wasn’t fully motivated to start development again. At this point, I honestly hadn’t even thought about QubeKwest in a while. Then something happened that made me immediately think of it. The Raspberry Pi 3 was released. I got to thinking, “Hey, I was totally going to try to get QubeKwest to work on a Raspberry Pi 2 and now a new one is out.”
As the proud owner of virtually every model of Raspberry Pi and someone that was very impressed with the new updates to the Raspberry Pi 3 (now with 64-bit CPU, and with built in WiFi and Bluetooth!) I immediately ordered several of them hoping they would be the last little nudge to resume for real. Or, if not the last little nudge, at least a nudge in the right direction.
The Raspberry Pi 3s came in and instead of starting development again I was inspired to reinstall Windows on my main development machine. Long story I won’t bother telling, but it needed it. That took almost a whole weekend. I was still a little nervous about starting again but I was starting to have fewer and fewer excuses. I hadn’t looked at the code in seven months and that meant trying to figure out what I was working on and what the heck I was thinking when I wrote that piece and where I go from here. But at least now I was ready.
I fired up Eclipse, I got annoyed at Eclipse, again. I started the hunt for another IDE. I grabbed IntelliJ IDEA and I like it so far. Last night I attacked the code for the first time and I found there were loads of things I needed to fix. I grabbed the latest LWJGL, but they had moved things around and renamed things and removed things so I had to fix my code to line up with their code again. I also had to figure out how to fix the various broken bits of code that I’d checked in when I put the project to sleep seven months ago.
After about an hour, I had a shiny new IntelliJ project set up, I had my external libraries configured, I had the worst parts of my busted code commented out or repaired, and I got my ugly red triangles back on the screen. I was in business again. I think the first thing I need to do is revisit the extremely sad network code and try to figure out what I was doing there. I am going to officially call that a plan! Let the coding begin.