the weekly meeting of one

jan 6th 2021

google keep is one of the tools i use the most. i ~keep there lots of reminders of little things to be done, things that i want to remember, etc.

regular usage.

one of the reminders is “kid a: meeting of the week”. the thing is: if i don’t have a reminder to check the project from time to time, it will simply vanish from my schedule altogether. not that i don’t have the time to work on this, i do. i just don’t sit to work unless i’m specifically thinking about this game a lot.

the weekly reminder serves that purpose. never let the game die on my mind. i don’t always do anything about it, but i have no intention to dismiss the reminder without at least thinking about kid a.

of course, i took a few days off in late december, to handle my mental health and etc. now i’m trying to get back on this train.

anyway, why call the reminder “meeting of the week?” i’m a solo dev, why a meeting?

let’s pretend this project had more people working on it. the meeting would be to define the next priorities, and check how everyone is doing, if anyone needs help, etc.

for a solo dev the meeting means that i will pause the project for a moment and check the trello board of the game. the “inbox” list is ginormous, so i find one or two things that will be done next and move them to “to-do”. then i look at what’s in “to-do” and “doing” to make sure the tasks are simple and small enough to be somewhat indivisible.

i already noticed that when a task is too large, i never start it. this is why the solo-meeting is so important to me, if something is still pending, it's probably because i can’t find a simple way to start. solution: break down the task into smaller tasks.

this week’s meeting called my attention to one of the tasks i had at hand: documentation of the code. by itself, “document the code” is a very large task. that’s why i’m having such difficulty with it, there is already too much code undocumented, a lot of files, etc. where to start? well… i just didn’t.

i had to break down the task into smaller ones. the first priority is to document the recipe process altogether, where i’m not only having the most trouble understanding where are the bugs, but also the feature i was last trying to develop, to no success.

right this second, i’m documenting only this segment of the code, so i can at least get back to developing when i’m done.