A dilemma

So, I like design (typography, bookmaking, etc.) and textual work (like with An Icelandic Primer). It gives me great joy and satisfaction.

I also like programming. I’ve done it for years.

At the moment, though, I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m talking about Beyond.

Coding is fun, and since I’ve been doing it for fifteen-plus years now I can hold my own. But the part I most enjoy, the area I want to spend most of my time, is design. Now, I don’t mean that I try to avoid doing the dirty work of actually building the things I design — to the contrary, I think it’s impossible to be a great designer unless you know how to use the tools and have a lot of experience doing so.

I guess it’s just that I want to be working on other projects, getting good at design, but I’ve got this huge obligation to turn Beyond into a reality. There’s something far more difficult about pulling off a project like this than about typesetting a text. So many different strands, so many possibilities for error, so much to be connected together. And that is cool and challenging and all that good stuff, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know.

Ordinarily I would suspect that this is a momentary, passing mood, but it’s been at the back of my thoughts for a while now. And yet I can’t just give up on Beyond. ~sigh~ Well, “you must do the thing you think you cannot do,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. My plan is to try to have Beyond up and running by the end of August, and then I can hopefully leave it in more capable hands. I don’t want to be attached to a project like that for the long-term when it’s going to require so much maintenance that I can’t work on much else. (And lest you think that I’m a starter who can’t finish things, let me hasten to add that design projects — like books, charts, etc. — usually have a definite completion point, whereas software tends to go on forever.) If my plan were to become a programmer, as a career, then I’d probably think differently, but I’m going to be a librarian, and most of what I see myself doing on the side in the future is design, not coding.

At the same time I don’t want to abandon a project just because it’s hard. Conquering difficult obstacles is how we grow. Hmm. But sometimes it is okay to stop work on a project — after all, there’s only so much time in a man’s life, and he has to spend it on things that really matter. And that’s why this is a dilemma: Beyond does matter, and it’ll help make genealogy easier. ~sigh~

How many people are working on this project? Would it make you feel better or worse if more people were working on this project? How could you get others to work on this project, if you would like more?

Right now there’s me and two other fellows. The ideal would be a world where a team of coders takes care of most of it, with me giving my input from time to time. But that’s like kicking my child out and asking someone else to raise him. I think I’m mainly just overwhelmed because it’s a project with no real end, and I don’t want to be locked into a single project like that — not for such a long time. We’ll see…