The challenge of time management in a no-profit scenario

While I haven't been making the kind of progress I'd like on my forum app, it has been on my mind a lot. Back in January I decided it was time for a regular salary job after two years of consulting, not for any financial reason, but to be in a place where my brain would be challenged and I wasn't the smartest person in the room. That part is going fairly well, but naturally with all of that time accounted for, I haven't spent a lot of time on my stuff.

And as time has rolled on, the code in the old version gets more and more scary to me. It's three years old, and it's pretty bad. I wouldn't say I didn't know what I was doing back then, but I certainly know a little better now (until three years from now). To rebuild my existing communities around it, I need to rewrite it, and that's going well, just really slow. I set up various milestones that I want to hit, with deadlines, and already I've missed one.

The problem is that I can't motivate myself to see these things as high priority when the pay-off isn't clear. I mean, having more scaleable sites with more manageable code is an obvious incentive, but things have been (barely) doing just fine for those three years. And on top of that, I give the code away. Ah, the good old days of ASP where I sold it for $175 per license! People wonder why I don't get the whole open-source scene. I like to get paid for what I do!

In any case, right now I miss the days of sitting on my deck and editing my book in the middle of July. Those were good times, and I'm constantly reminded of them on nice days like today. But I need to get back to working for The Man... for now...

1 Comment

  • I think there is still a bit of market for forum software, at least for integrating into .Net projects.
    I don't think CommunityServer has it "in the can" nor does PopForums.

    I think the option to have threaded messages is good, rather than just flat one-response-after-the-other-by-time that seems very common (good for blogs).

    For open-source: Don't be afraid to close the system and provide good extension mechanisms. In the one project where I have used PopForums, the people who were supposed to be responsible for development used the source as a lever to do very bad things. I think they changed almost every interface there was. They would not have been able to do this with a black box.



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