First Week of Programming Re-Introduction

As I type this I'll be wrapping up about a week playing with a programming mini-project. I'm scheduling it to come out much later than that, of course, which is why I'm saying quite specifically, "As I type this..."

I'm sneaky like that.

I originally wanted to work on a project using Ruby on Rails. I've been reading Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby during off-time and occasionally during lunch at work, but the practical hands-on project I've been working on is written in Visual Basic .NET.

Yeah, I know, Visual Basic. I already explained why in a previous blog entry.

What have I learned this first week?

I'm still re-familiarizing myself with details of how things work in VB and Visual Studio. I'm no doubt making some tasks harder than they need to be; a side effect of practical inexperience. Re-learning...not as bad as learning, but frustrating when you know you've done something before but just can't remember it.

It doesn't help that I'm not focused for periods of time on the project. I tend to work on it for an hour or two a day, after coming home from the office. I get home a little late, I watch something while having some dinner, then work on the project, go to bed later than I should, wake up, yawn, and wish I had gone to bed sooner. Repeat.

The last thing I really learned was that Joel Spolsky was right; write a spec.  Or for a small one-person project, take the time to plan out what you're doing. I have been doing the seat-of-pants approach to this mini-project, primarily focusing on "here's what I want it to do, and to do that, I need it to do X,..." then I tried to create X. Then identify the next obstacle and work on that. I didn't know if I was really going in the right direction so much as I was creating a series of fixes that may or may not repeat functionality or at least overlap.

That's pretty much the project summary. A lot of re-familiarization and a hint of re-planning with a few drops of wishing I could dedicate more than an hour a night to it. Is this how most software projects work if it's not your day job? Because for me it gets just plain frustrating (in addition to the frustrations of running into logic problems and figuring out why something just doesn't work.)