When you're around something a lot, you tend to get comfortable with it. There's a certain danger in that because you build a bias over time toward the comfortable state and cease to easily re-evaluate it from time to time.
Yes, I tend to think of this as the reason that people stay in non-functional or harmful relationships. It's like living with your child. You don't notice them growing because you see them every day, yet they're obviously different in some way.
Believe it or not, the relationship was actually the secondary angle I thought of here. The first came in the context of software development. In a meeting today we were talking about how we're around our own app so much that we tend to have a hard time figuring out how to make it better. Naturally I can translate that into my own projects as well, given my lack of dedication to improving them. In those cases, they've been the same for so long that I fail to realize they could be a hell of a lot better.
But every once in awhile, you make little strides, and then you try to build on those wins. Tonight, for example, I wrote the mass-mailer component for the forum app. It came together in about two hours of coding, and it's pretty efficient. It's another thing off the list. With the thread subscription piece, which lives in that area, I think I've got something I can really use in production.
I really want to get CB done in the worst way, but I'm finding it so hard to sit down and work out the coaster and park database pieces. I don't have clear use cases in my head, I want it to be more in the hands of the users, and I've allowed it to be more complex than it really is. I'm annoyed with myself.
Fortunately, the other pieces, including the forum, are in pretty good shape. I need to get a news rotator bit in there, but that's really straight forward.
I don't know how I can continue to be comfortable with that site. It's embarrassing the way it is now.
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