Status report, 21 Nov 2007
The day job is giving me serious grief, so very little project work is getting done. I’m stressed out and spending a lot of time resting. I do badly need a holiday, but if I wasn’t working in this environment I wouldn’t need a holiday nearly so much.
I’m doing a lot of thinking and planning for the file synchronizer - it’s my biggest ongoing computing problem right now - but not a lot of code is getting written. I’m also a bit nervous that I won’t have such a need for it in a few months and hence will lose interest in the project. I’d like to get something working ASAP, but the day job sucks up all of my energy. Without the day job I won’t need the synchronizer so much - so it’s a bit of a Catch-22.
I have Rentacoder and Elance bids out for some filesystem traversal code. I’m disappointed so far. I’ve been bid between USD$80 and $350. I sat down in front of the TV today, watched an episode of Daria and an episode of Futurama and had it done. Half of that was remembering that Python’s sqlite module doesn’t automatically commit to the database and wondering why there was no data in the database. Plus the hour I spent writing the spec and the hour I spent setting up accounts and the $10 Elance setup fee. There are a few bids which are attractive because the programmers obviously know their stuff, but I just can’t bring myself to spend $200 on an hour-long job which I’ve already finished.
There’s an obvious flipside here - if Rentacoder and Elance bids are so high, I can probably earn a bit of pocket money through them. Earning money by bidding on online jobs is very attractive to me. Of course, people go on there expecting to pay the coders crap. It might just be a matter of sorting through the bid requests and picking ones that I can do profitably and ignoring the requests with very low prices.
On the upside, the USD is in the shitter so stuff is cheap for me to buy. On the downside, one of my income sources pays in USD, so that’s suddenly become a lot less valuable.
I’ll be moving to Melbourne in January, right around linux.conf.au. I’m pretty excited. Rents are so much cheaper than Sydney, so it’s likely that I’ll be able to afford something with a nice view. Rent is still my biggest ongoing expense. Once I cut out expenses for crap cafe food at work and car fuel+maintenance (urgh! the damn thing keeps breaking!) it’ll account for 60% of my expenses. Living lean has its advantages.
Just thinking about the file synchronizer is useful at the moment, though. There’s a lot of unknowns that I haven’t worked out yet - it’s the sort of problem that can be described succinctly, but working out all of the intricacies of the solution (and a UI to suit) is fairly complicated. I’m torn between working out every nuance or just jumping in and getting something 80% working. The first milestone will be to write something that can replace Unison, and I’ve got that pretty well worked out. It’s just unsuitable for later features that I want to add (backups, Time Machine and flash-drive metadata exchange).