S02E02: Cannot Complete a Project

03/13/2025, duration: 11:00

Video

Transcript

In the episode today, I talk about completing a project and what the challenges are for me on completing and what I do to solve those challenges and getting stuff done. Today, I'd like to talk about the topic that I've brushed upon earlier. There are more episodes regarding this topic, but I guess I'm still failing at it, is completing things.

So I have a cycle, I start a new project and I started very enthusiastically. I have a new ID, for example, DanCuts. I moved on to DanCaptures. I was very enthusiastic. I moved on to DanVid Studio and all those projects are not finished. And that's my cycle. At some point, my interest dies down. Sometimes it gets too complicated. Sometimes there are some technical hurdles and it takes energy to overcome those hurdles. And at the time, I often do not have that energy to overcome the hurdle. And then I find something else that's very shiny and interesting. And I move on to that. The result is that I put a lot of effort into a project or some effort. It's not always a lot and it gets discarded. I might pick it up at a later point, but personally, I then feel sad is not really the right word, but I feel kind of sad that I'm leaving that work behind and not finishing it and publishing it or making it work.

And I have two feelings about that. At one point, I feel that, well, I have learned a lot from doing that thing. So DanCuts and DanCaptures, I've learned a lot on about Electron. I can apply that to other projects. And on the other side, I feel that it's a shame that the other effort related to the project specifically itself is wasted.

So specifically for DanCuts and DanVid Studio and DanCapture, I created a blue sky post and that shows how I went into it and how I hope to dive out of it. So it's a pyramid or a triangle upside down. But I, at that point I was at the bottom. So I was working on DanVid Studio, but now I'm kind of branching into a different pyramid. So I was working with DanVid Studio and I have it working in DanCaptures.

And now I'm running into some problems with speed and efficiency. So when it plays a movie, when I tested initially, I tested with some smaller movies for a couple of seconds and those all worked. But I created a test with HD movies. So 1920 by 1080 pixels. And there I find that the movie playback in the preview is a bit choppy because it isn't able to render the frames fast enough. And that's probably because it takes a while to extract the video, to extract the image from the video. And so there are some technical challenges there. And it was too expected. I'm not a noob. I'm not naive. It's complicated stuff, but I was hoping that it would work also because I got really excited when it worked. When I was just doing tests, I was, Hey, this works. Let's move on to the next thing. And I was on a real high. And then I kind of hit the road bump. And for now, the road bump seemed to be a bit too high.

And I am going to get back to it. But I have branched into some other stuff. Also, I was sitting behind my computer and not feel like doing anything or at least working on the NVH Studio. And I realized I could be spending this time waiting for the time to be up and not having done a lot of stuff on the NVH Studio, or I can work out some other small projects to just get the engine flowing.

So I've been working on two things, both internally for myself, or a tool I call Cards, which is basically a tool that renders Notion databases or pages and allows you to swipe to all the different pages in the database. So the reason that I was working on that or created it is that I was working on a weekly schedule or a daily schedule for every day of the week.

And an idea popped into my head what it would be cool if I can just open my phone, swipe to the right day of the week, and there it shows what the planning is for that week. So do I do a walk in the morning? What do I do in the evening? Things like that. So regular repeating week stuff. And since I already have experience with creating a blog in Notion and different integrations with Notions, I figured let's not do it with a CMS. I can just do that stuff in Notion. Notion is very powerful with that.

And I can just do an API integration and get the information from Notion. And so that's what I'm currently working on together with Cursor. And it's about as far as that I have the swiping thing done or Cursor did because I didn't do anything about it. It generated the code for it. And I'm just tweaking it here and there. I wanted to remember the last page I was on, things like that. So that's a small tool that I've been working on.

And the other tool is that a couple of years ago, like five, six years ago already, I created a RSS reader in PHP that aggregates the RSS for me. And then I branched that out also into following Reddit X and other sources. And that would, that allows me to read news or at least snippets of news all in the same location without having to open different apps and access different things.

And I was kind of testing V0 from Versailles to generate a node version of that in Next.js. It didn't do that well, basically. So at the end I tossed what it had generated and I started working on it myself using Cursor. But that's a low priority thing because the PHP thing works. I just want to make some changes because in the PHP solution I had, I did some shortcuts so I'm not able to delete feeds or things like that. And new features. I'm not going to add new features to the PHP thing because I don't really do any PHP personally anymore.

And I am thinking about a new feature that registers the different articles that I read. And then at the end of the week, it could generate some kind of aggregated what I've read. And that's something that I might share so other people can see what I found interesting. If they have the same interest as me, that might be cool.

To go back to moving from project to project and not completing things, I don't want to be too hard on myself. I know this is mostly side projects and a hobby and it should be fun. But at some point it might also be fun to complete things. And as I've already discussed in the earlier episodes, I kind of also know the solution.

So the solution for me is pretty straightforward. I create a list and I create a list of small, broken down, atomized things that need to be done for that to come to a specific version. That's also what I did with completing ObserverLize, for example. Only I tend to forget that that helps. And it's also mentally kind of tasking to create that list. But it is when I got the small side projects out, like cards.

And when that's done, I will probably create the to-do list for both DanVid Studio and DanCaptures. And for DanVid Studio, we will be getting it to a point that it's releasable, maybe creating a Reddit post, see if there's any other interest. And for DanCaptures, it's about whether I can use it myself, whether it captures my desktop properly, and whether the result is something that I can share on YouTube, for example, as an aggregated thing saying, hey, I worked on building Feature-I and then creating a time-lapse of me building Feature-I.

But those are really high-level things and I need to break those down into smaller items. And hopefully, that's what I'm also thinking, is that those to-do lists I can also bring into cards and give me an easy swipable interface and an overview of active projects and what the to-dos are for those projects. That's what I'm hoping for.

And that's what I wanted to discuss today. So, completing projects is not my strongest suit. At work, I find it pretty easy. Often, I work at an agency, so I work for clients, and there's often a scope, there's a deadline. So, the to-do list and the features that need to be created have already been created. It needs to be set on the timeline. It is often already the timeline, there's a deadline. So, there it's pretty straightforward. But in my personal things, that's things that you need to do yourself, and sometimes I find that challenging.

All right? If you'd like the podcast or the video, check out my BlueSky account, where I occasionally share updates, and I'll talk to you later. Bye!