For years I spent a bit of time writing various things. Whether it was for some publication, a news paper, a web site, or technical documentation, I seemed to have my bouts of Writer’s Block. One thing I would do to combat my block would be to head on over to the local library or head over to the book store. Once I got there, I would go down random isles, pick up 1 random book from the isle, and then head to another. I would do this until I had 10 books on various subjects. Most of the time the subjects or books contained material I either knew nothing about or were books I wouldn’t be caught dead reading.
After I had the books, I wasn’t planning on reading the entire book, I was going to do my version of un-intelligent speed reading. A trick I learned while in High School, which of course never worked since I failed most of my reading assignments 🙂 What I would do is read 1 paragraph from each chapter of each book. Typically this would take me about 20 minutes and if I was lucky I would pick an interesting paragraph. Just a note about me, I am the unluckiest person in the world, hint hint. So after reading my paragraphs in all of the books, I took a second to see if I could come up with a witty statement, combining something from everything I read together to make one hell of a mess, but at times they were pretty interesting. Anyways, this technique would help cure my writer’s block a majority of the time. If it didn’t, then depending on how I felt I would try the procedure over again, this time with magazines or news papers.
So now this leads me to another type of block I have been experiencing lately. Developer’s Block. I am completing a couple of development projects soon that were ideas created by others in which I was asked to work on. Now I am finding myself trying to figure out what I want to work on next, and for some reason, I cannot think of anything. The last couple of projects have been web based projects, one based on Django and the other based on Drupal. The Django project is the first real project I have worked on using Django, and I have learned a lot. I absolutely enjoy Django as it is still a challenge for me. I had worked on a Django application at my last job, but found myself getting annoyed because, as Mr. Movie Phone says, “It was the crappiest piece of crap in craptown.” The Drupal project has been mind-numbingly painful as I have never been a huge PHP fan and never spent the time learning it before doing it, though the same went with my Django project as well.
So now what I am to do? I wouldn’t mind working on another Django project to be honest, but I don’t know what I want to do. I know I would like to start the application from scratch and work it through. It is funny, we go back 3 years and I wasn’t a Python fan. Now that I have messed with it for the past couple of years, I absolutely enjoy it. I would really like to work on a desktop application again but I don’t know what. I was thinking about KHelpCenter in KDE as it is an absolute mess that needs to be cleaned up, but there are stipulations I feel to it. I think documentation for one in the Linux community needs to be generic or easily readable by all platforms. I also feel that there is a need for a collaboration on a help viewer. Then in KDE there are these What Is tips for the applications that can be tied in, and recently I read an idea for KDE help that was really interesting, though I didn’t fully understand it.
So because of that, I am feeling that I am currently in a state dubbed Developer’s Block. Have any of you experienced such a block? If so, how did you overcome it? Maybe I am experiencing this block because my mind is in various types of development environments all at once. Web based, Python, C++, help, etcetera. Where to go from here?
