One thing I have been doing lately is under estimating the size of my projects. For instance, One of my blog readers/e-pals has been talking to me about creating a flash music store for indie artists that want to sell their music online. Well not really thinking about it I had assumed it wouldn’t take me that long to create a music store. Little did I know how badly I underestimated the time it takes to create a good back-end user interface.
I started on the MP3 store months ago but just recently started working on it often and once I got to the admin panel I started to see how much longer it would actually take me to make the store. Feeling almost defeated and a little bit embarrassed that I had seriously underestimated the work required to create a store I chose to put the project on hold. One of the pressuring factors is the fact I really feel like I need to get my butt in gear and start in the kids avatar chat if I want to reach semi-commercial quality soon.
I’m not giving up on the store, in fact I hope to return to the project as an even better programmer and create a serious good music store one day. I’m a bit thankful that I took the time to stumble onto my mistake this early. By seeing how badly I underestimated the work required to create the store it has showed me that my own goals for the mmo I’m making are still WAY out of my reach. By realizing this I have come to terms with setting my own goals for my mmo a lot lower.
Right now I’m putting all my energy into creating the best kids avatar chat I possibly can. I know that I will one day make the avatar chat into a full virtual world but first I need to make the chat! So starting tonight I’m going back and looking at all my code to refresh my brain and make a few more comments.
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Underestimating project development time is a caveat of many programmers; the root cause is typically a lack of requirement analaysis and failure to construct a formal implementation plan ahead of time.
… sounds like a case of “go as far as you can see and then you’ll see further”
We learn, what else can we ask for?
Matt : sounds like a NTSB report