Project Vee, which (I will now admit) is the next major update of my product The Journal, isn’t done yet. So I can’t do a proper post-mortem.

 

However, it is what I spent most of 2008 working on, so I’ll do a quick post-mortem-like review.

 

 

 

I even worked on it some yesterday (Xmas) afternoon. Because, yes, I program for fun.

 

 

Granted, a lot of that “looking good” comes from the third-party skinning component I bought. But still, it’s beginning to look like a major update, “The Journal Done Better”, and not just “The Journal Warmed Over”.

 

 

 

 

 

My major conclusion has been that I will never fully master project management. Or programming, for that matter. Some things you never master, and you only get better at them when you practice. And make mistakes. And practice some more.

 

-David

 

Late last year, after the debacle of trying to buy a pricey board game for my birthday, I decided instead to invest in my present and future health and took my refund and started a new hobby: weight training.

 

My goals weren’t particularly high:

 

As I’ve mentioned any number of times: I’m a geek. I know I’m a geek (though not always a Geek in Good Standing). As such, I’ve never looked like George Clooney, never had sixpack abs, never had particularly broad shoulders, and while my long fingers would kill you at schoolyard “mercy” games I’ve always been an easy mark when armwrestling. Hell, I weighed only 130 lbs (60 kg) when I started college–and I was 6′ 1″ (185 cm). “Ectomorph” hardly begins to describe me.

 

So, yeah, I didn’t dream big dreams. I kept my goals manageable. (And promised myself that no matter what happened, I would never become an amateur bodybuilder and/or photograph myself nearly naked [I had a friend who did both of  these when he turned 40; he sent me the pictures before I knew what he was doing; you should never do that to your friends]).

 

This is my review of my first year’s progress.

 

 

 

My overall physical fitness has improved considerably. My waistline is about the same as it was–but the paunch that hung over my waistline is much reduced. I’m measurably stronger (I have the log sheets to prove it). And my upper arms, shoulders and chest have filled in noticeably (noticeable to me and my wife, anyway; remember: no pictures).

 

In addition, my legs show a nice, new definition in the muscles, and (for the first time in my life) I have a non-bony back.

 

 

I worked out 5 days a week this entire year, missing only a couple weeks early on due to illness and one week I deliberately took “off” back in October.

 

I do my workout in the morning, after eating breakfast. It takes about 35-40 minutes on average. The most grueling day (currently Monday) takes longer than the average, and usually requires at least 3-5 minutes of rest afterward (dead lifts are great for the lower back, but are exhausting).

 

So far, it’s been a great way to start the day.

 

 

The initial investment in equipment was rather more than I expected:

 

It all adds up (especially since I decided–for good reasons–to go with 2″ Olympic-style free weights and bars). But, once you have them, they don’t exactly wear out.

 

Over the year I added:

 

And last week, celebrating my 40th birthday (sorta), I bought:

 

All told, though, it still cost less than paying for a health club membership for a year (and certainly less than I’ve invested in third-party components for Project Vee). And I still have it all for next year’s use.

 

 

 

I’m a guy doing weight training on his own, by himself. As such, I have to be very careful.

 

So far, so good.

 

Seriously, I try to be conscious of what I’m doing any time I’m handling the free weights, dumbbells and barbells. My father’s back went out on him when he was younger than I am now, and I want to avoid that.

 

For the same reason, I’m very conscious of my form when doing exercises. I want to improve my physical condition, not brag about how much I curl, press or squat. (OK, fine, I’ll brag a little: 45 lbs [per arm], 100 lbs, and 200 lbs, respectively, in 2 sets of 10 reps.) And if I think I’m “cheating” on an exercise, or just being sloppy, I’ll scale back the weight involved. Results (and remaining injury free) matter more than bragging rights.

 

For example, a couple months ago I noticed my forearms were remaining sore for 2-3 days (I called it “wrist splints”; I’m sure there’s another name for it). So I started paying closer attention to my bicep workout, and discovered a couple of places I could improve how I was performing the exercises, plus I scaled back the curl weight a bit. Those changes have made a difference.

 

 

I haven’t just blindly followed a workout plan I found somewhere on the Web or in a book. I’ve read up on weight training and fitness throughout the year, and tweaked my workout based on what I’ve read and what I’ve experienced first hand. I’ve added exercises to fill in gaps that I saw, and dropped at least one exercise because it was having an adverse effect on my shoulder joints.

 

 

Nothing really went wrong in my weight training (I refer you back to the lack of injuries). But there were a couple of things that weren’t expected.

 

 

It seems that working out 5 days a week, every week, for an entire year produces merely “significant” results. Not so much “dramatic”.

 

I can see two main mitigating factors:

 

I have no doubt if I changed one or both I would speed up my progress. Currently, though, I don’t plan to do either. Because I like being (reasonably) pain free, and I don’t want to pay even more for groceries than I already do.

 

Or, as my wife likes to point out: It took me years to get the body I had at the beginning of 2008, so I should be patient.

 

 

Sure, I knew I was thin, but I had no idea I how skinny I was (for a guy with that much middle) until I was a few months into the year. In my own mind, I was … more or less … “normal”. I was wrong. Sure, my gut had expanded as I went through my 30’s and I had added a new chin or two, but the rest of me had remained pretty much as thin as before.

 

That’s another reason I think I don’t obviously show the results of nearly a year of effort: I had a lot of filling in to do.

 

 

I plan to continue my weight training into 2009 and beyond. The daily workout is a part of my life now, and I even enjoy it.

 

My goals for next year remain much the same as they were this year:

 

I’m looking forward to both.

 

-David

 

 

This is where I found my original workout plan:

 

Though I’ve changed the specifics quite a bit, my workout still looks a lot like Mark’s Workout Plan to Build Muscle.

 

This is my primary reference on the exercises I do:

 

ExRx’s Exercise & Muscle Directory has been incredibly useful to me.

 

I sat down last weekend and added up the time I had spent on Project Vee since September 2007. Come the end of December, I’ll have clocked a full man-year.

 

One man-year might not seem like that much. But try it all by yourself sometime, with no one paying you, and see how long it seems then.

 

If I had known when I started the project that was going to be at it this long, I would’ve trimmed it back. Way back.

 

Instead, I looked at my planned additions, changes, and fixes and estimated I would be in testing in 6 months of so. Those 6 months or so were past nearly 6 months ago now. I trim the list now, of course, but that only manages to bring the light at the end of the tunnel into view again.

 

I guess I should’ve seen this coming.

 

While the prototype/first version of The Journal took only a month to design and build, the first shareware version took 4 months. And The Journal 3, a ground-up redesign and rewrite took over a year, 14 man-months spread over 1999, 2000 and 2001. The Journal 4 took most of 2004 in one big chunk.

 

Development of Artifact 1 spanned 1997, 1998, and 1999.

 

The unfinished Paintball Net project ate up most of 2002 and large chunks of 2005, 2006 and 2007 (time I’ll never get back).

 

All of those projects were originally estimated to take much less time.

 

There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from this. First, estimating project timelines is hard. In fact, it’s probably impossible. You make the best guess you can based on past experience, and know that once you start working you’ll have to adapt to changing requirements and external pressures and just, well, life.

 

Second, the nature of software development and programming is becoming more and more complex. This makes it even more impossible (are there really degrees of impossibility?) to accurately estimate project timelines. And makes me wonder how much longer we lone developers will be able to continue doing what we do.

 

I’ve always been more likely to buy a solution than build it on my own. But even if you can see the savings of time versus the money spent, it doesn’t remove the need to learn how to properly use and integrate that newly purchased solution into your project. In Project Vee, for example, I bought a third-party database component (because I’m not stupid). But I still have to wear the hats of database designer and database administrator and database coder and coordinate the database schema with the internal data structures (also designed and implemented by me). I bought a third-party library that provides simple skinning of the user interface, but I still have to get into the guts of the code to figure out how to best use it–and deal with the little oddnesses that inevitably crop up when you dink around that intimately with the Win32 API.

 

High level design work, medium level integration, and low level bug hunting, I have to do it all, often piling on hats and grinding gears multiple times within a single day.

 

It’s almost enough to make me long for the days when I was a specific type of programmer, and knew that on a given day I’d be facing problems within a narrow, well-defined domain. And when I wasn’t directly responsible for either the original timeline estimate–or the inevitable slippage.

 

Ah, well. I’m a man-year in now, and closer to the end than the beginning. I can actually see the end now, which is a nice change.

 

-David