All projects start with an idea.

This is the initial motivation that drives us to work tirelessly on a project with the goal of reaching this idea.

But like many projects, as time goes on, this initial motivation starts to fade away and doubt begins to settle in.

For quite awhile, I could ignore this doubt as I was on autopilot, smoothing out the experience I had already established.

I figured I’d think of something eventually.

Now, it should be no surprise that I’m not the only one taking on this task. My idea originally came from the crazy walls found on TV and movies so it’s not like it’s a new idea.

Since I was taking the development of LINK seriously, I wanted to better understand my “competitors” and the ecosystem I was entering.

I put “competitors” in quotes because I really didn’t think of them as competitors. To qualify as a competitor, we’d have to be trying to attract the same group of people, fighting over who is better than the other.

But this is exactly what I did. I made them out to be competitors.

I lost my point of reference and turned to them for guidance. This slowly poisoned my decision making and I was only concerned with who was better and how I could be better.

And of course, what feature did I think LINK was lacking?

Adding Images

You’d think that this feature would be a no brainer.

Half of my notes end up with some sort of sketch to better explain an idea than I could with words alone.

So I added the ability to drop images into the program.

Finally, I was getting somewhere.

Or so I thought.

Normally I’d get a feature working at it’s bare minimum and then move on to other important features. There’s a lot I want to accomplish so I have to mind my time carefully.

But I was lost and instead of working towards my goals I was chasing everyone else’s goals.

You see? Image support is quite limited right now. It works but a bit of pre-processing in an actual image editing app might be required before it works well.

At the end of the day, the goal of being able to display images inside of LINK was accomplished, but I couldn’t see it.

I added image support because my competitors have images and if I hope to compete, it has to be better.

Long story short, I ended up writing a JPEG Exif parser and was considering reading through a 700+ page textbook on Digital Signal Processing to learn how to fix my ugly scaling issues.

I was now chasing bugs for features that I didn’t really care about and it was exhausting.

In the mean time, I was only getting further and further from my own goals.

Finding the Fun

If I hope to make LINK awesome, I can’t follow my “competitors” path. I have to follow my own.

At my core, I am someone who is always looking to find the fun in everything. And I really do mean everything.

LINK is no exception. Every meaningful decision was guided by finding the fun.

I wanted to make adding new notes fun, so I made it as easy as double clicking and typing away.

I spent so much time on text editing because for it to be fun, it should never get in the way.

Now, I realize that it’s not the same fun that can be found when playing a video game or watching a movie but I do get distracted (almost to fault) adding new notes because it feels good.

I strongly believe that if I can find the fun, LINK will be worth the time I’ve spent on it and much more.

Moving Forward

I’m releasing what I was working on as a Work in Progress build. It’s buggy and incomplete and I wouldn’t trust it to not break something but it’s there to mess around with.

Ultimately the next step in LINK’s development will take awhile to negotiate.

I almost want to say rewrite, but I hate the idea of a rewrite.

Too often I’ve seen good software lose a lot of it’s chutzpah and then never fully recover from it.

Instead I prefer refactor.

Where as a rewrite generally means starting from scratch, the idea behind a refactor is that I’ll be able to keep the features I’ve already spent hours, days even, working on while making improvements to the worst of it.

I’ve refactor code in the past but never to this degree. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.

I’ll of course keep you updated with regular blog posts and as I get features knocked off I’ll upload preview builds for those of you who are interested.

I’m excited to have rediscovered why I started working on LINK in the first place. Now I just need to make sure I don’t forget it again.