I’ve been thinking about how to plan not just a large development project, but multiple large development projects together on a timeline and allow for interrupt work.
We’ve managed to put together a roadmap for the next fiscal year. It looks nice, and it conveys useful information for our plan for the year. But it has some flaws, and I’ve been mentally taking a step back to try to understand the purpose of having a roadmap, and what useful results it feeds.
One thing we’re learning as we stay home during C19 is that “if we only had the time” isn’t real. I think it’s one of the unexpected more depressing aspects of this whole situation.
When provided with the “opportunity” of “spare time” to work on those things that we’ve always wanted to get done, we’re not actually doing any more of them than we ever did. Having no place to be on Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday evenings like we usually would doesn’t re-open those evenings for other productive activities.
I recall some times back in college where I would play wingman to my roommate for his many female acquaintances. The situation reminds me a bit of some of those movies where there’s some dignitary or higher-up that has an assistant that remembers everyone’s name and position for them. For example, in The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway’s character attends a function with her boss, the titular “Devil”, and serves up the names of some of the party guests and reasons to talk to or dodge them.
I was listening to podcasts this morning, and as one podcast ended and rolled over to the next, it forced me to recall this situation. The next podcast was partially played, and so it started in the middle with no description of context. It took me several seconds to realize what I was listening to, and where it had left off.
Over the last week or two I’ve been looking for an iPad app that functions like a virtual drawing notebook. I would like to use my Apple Pencil exclusively to interact with this virtual notebook. I’ve been using it explicitly to draw dungeon maps so far, but I’m thinking of a number of ways that this could be useful for other purposes, like app interface design.
I have a few apps that are already good at drawing with the Pencil. Considering the few that do not fit this specific need that I have in mind, Notability is nice, but it centers too much on the content of the page being text-flow-driven. Likewise with the built-in Notes app. Bear works with the Pencil, but its drawing tools are weird and separated from the text part of the app even worse than the other tools.
I was going to write something profound this morning, but instead, I’m going to complain about my cat.
I have some time blocked out in the morning around breakfast to write some stuff for the blog. It’s not a lot of time, but it seems to be enough to actually get some written stuff online, which is more than I’ve been able to do regularly over the last couple of years.