Deep in Geekdom

My brain imploded the moment I tried to do something which was just far too advanced for its limited ability. It involved strange ugly creatures that lurk in the deep places of the Java programming language; exotic elaborations of inconceivably weird data sets that my mind just couldn’t comprehend in their entirety.

I was trying to capture input from a touchscreen in an array but the array needed to be held in another array, and the whole thing wrapped in classes which defined the methods of storing the data and then freeing memory when no longer needed. Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps I was simply trying to go too fast. I don’t know. I could no longer remember the difference between implementing a class and extending a class. The web wasn’t helping. My questions on an Android programming forum had gone unanswered. I was left reading example source code that was thousands of lines long and impossible to unravel. It just made me feel like the little I had accomplished in a week and a half was precisely just that: a little. At midnight last night, I pushed myself away from my desk and went to draw a cartoon for the next couple of hours whilst Dumb & Dumber playing on the box.

So, as it stands, the little app I’ve written is almost finished. It had taken the entire weekend for me to realise that I couldn’t expand it to be something more useful. One of the worst things about life as a programmer was dealing with feature creep – the excitement of clients who want their simply database to run their entire world. Now I’m programming for myself, the feature creep is worse than ever.

However, I’m now trying to wrap it up and get back to blogging. There are parts of the app that need to be finished but they’re the dull parts such as a settings screen and it’s hard to find the enthusiasm to code them. I still need a way to export and import user data but since I’ll probably be the only user, I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble. I also need to spend time using this app, learn its flaws and try to work out if this is a genuinely useful tool which will do all it was intended to do: write my blog, clip my toenails, and tell me that the meaning of life is the number 42.