Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

I’ve been holding onto a few ideas for software products. There’s two in particular that I would like to start building but actually starting them is the problem. I keep looking at these ideas in from the point of a finished product. What I end up visualising is a finished and polished product that has seen at least a year of development. When I do this it ends up putting me off even writing that first line of code and what I’m simply left with is an idea.

The book Rework puts it nicely:

Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those.

— Rework

Ideas are nice, but so is coffee, donuts and other forms of instant gratification. They’re within easy reach and quickly consumed. Ideas require time, in fact they can take a considerable length of time and that's the part that puts me off.

Despite the many advances in software development frameworks, there’s only so much of an application that can be generated automatically, the real work lies in the taking the idea and making it into something that’s more than an idea. It doesn’t need to be a finished product, it can be a well executed feature of the product that provides some value. Once that’s built, it’s time to move onto delivering the next set of value and so on. It's about breaking the idea down into manageable features that can be shipped on a regular schedule.

Right, I’ve put it off long enough. Time for a coffee and a few hours in front of my text editor. Let’s see where we can take these ideas.

Life or Death on the Roll of the Dice

This brought back a few memories.

Despite their unique preferences and stylistic tendencies, all of the module authors I spoke with agree that there’s a difference between being a good Dungeon Master and writing a great adventure. A Dungeon Master should be concerned with creating a seamless and engaging narrative for their players. An adventure writer, on the other hand, needs to produce modules that will motivate those DMs, capturing their imaginations while leaving them room to embellish, adjust, and alter as desired.

— Total Party Kill - The Architects of Dungeons & Dragons by Wills Plummer

I had a short spell (groan) as a DM but I didn't have a full grasp of the rules at the time. Enjoyed my time as a player though.

How I Use My Notebooks

Jenny Mason shares a her notebook preferences and their uses.

My pocket notebooks are filled with all sorts of useful information that I need on hand for the present. Nothing work related goes in here, this is purely a notebook for me. I have weekly personal to do lists with all things that I want to accomplish that week. I have order information scrawled on random pages, blog post ideas, trip ideas, travel itineraries and lists of things I need. I have lists of books I want to read, notes of things I want to research or look into and on a rare occasion there are doodles.

— How I Use My Notebooks by Jenny Mason

via The Cramped

I've got something of a fascination with writing. It's not that I want to become a writer, although the idea is rather tempting, I'm just curious about the process that writers go through from an idea or concept through to the final published article or book.

The fascination with writing started in secondary school. For an assignment we had to submit a short story on anything we wanted. I wrote about my first experience with a death in the family that happened just a few years before I started secondary school. After submitting the story I didn't think anything else of it until the day we got our assignments back. There were a few red pen marks where I had bad grammar or spelling mistakes but other than that I received a "very good" on my assignment. After class the teacher asked me to stay back for a minute. He congratulated me on the honesty of my story and the re-telling of the moment in my life.

A couple of years later and during the build up to my exams we had to submit a short story. At the time I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy books, so I decided to try and pull the two genres together into a single story. Unfortunately it sounded too much like a series of books that was already out, but I decided to run with it any and see what I could do. I received a favourable grade for my story but I was marked down for my short story being unoriginal.

It was few years from then until I started a mind mapping blog called MindMapSwitch. It was my first attempt at writing and while the blog was a moderate success, it did get me more hooked on writing. It was during this time that I bought Stephen King's On Writing book as well as a few ebooks on writing.

Today, I'm still writing as often as I can, but the idea of being a writer is something that seems so far away. A number of people I follow on Twitter have made the jump to being full-time writers or are on their way. They're publishing as often as they can and they are clearly happy with the change to being a full-time writer.

Despite writing on my blog now for over two years, I still don't identify myself as a writer. I do write yes but it's more on a hobby basis. I write for myself when I can and that's it. I have ideas for books that I would one day like to write but the prospect of even putting out a short book on a particular topic seems so out of my reach. For now I'm fine with having an interest in writing. As long as I'm on the fringe of writing, it will be something I'll always appreciate.

Recruitment agency has sent me a role for a rail engineer. Nice to know that Ruby on Rails attracts roles outside of programming.

Growing Up Too Fast?

I was watching Ethan this morning as he was playing with a friend on the Playstation. A session of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare was in full play and the boys we're chatting about new video games, golf, going back to school as well as planning their next zombie assault. It got me thinking how different things are for kids today when it comes to media and whether that change is causing kids to mentally age faster.

The biggest difference I see is the prescence of media now. Everywhere we go, we have instant access to the latest news and headlines, trending topics and sometimes things that are just too horrifying to believe have happened.

I remember being the same age as Ethan and growing up in Canada. We had a record player, tape deck and a television. That was the extent of our media devices in the house. Most days my parents would get their fill of news from newspapers that they bought on a daily basis, but I never read those. I don't remember ever watching the news on television but I always watched cartoons like Spiderman and shows like Knightrider and the ice hockey was always on at night. I just don't remember the news at all.

Compare this with Ethan who has his own iPhone and a Playstation. He gets his fill of news from the BBC Newsround website which is news for younger kids. It's good because it explains what's happening in the world without complicating the story. They report most of the events that are in the news and explain why it's happening. We tend not to watch the news on television unless it's something serious but that's thankfully not happened for a while. If we are watching and Ethan sees it, we explain as best we can why it's happening.

As for exposing him to other media, we certainly draw the line on movies and games. Me and Jen use our own judgement when it comes to these but games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto are out until he's older. The same goes for movies. There's ratings on them for a reason.

Most of us have probably played some kind of war based game as kids but when we did we drew on our knowledge from television and movies that we had seen. When we were kids and running about shooting each other we used our experiences from movies to feed our imagination. That has changed and the advancement of technology means that movies and games now have a better sense of realism. Whether it ages your kids mentally though is difficult to measure but I always like to err on the side of caution.

Controlling and curating the media that our kids consume doesn't mean they won't grow up fast, after all I'm sure he's getting an education in the school playground. It just means we're slowing down the rate at which they grow mentally and that's not a bad thing. There's plenty of time to experience what the world has to offer but as a kid you get more from using your own imagination. And I rather see that for as long as I can before they experience the reality of the world.