A week and a half of freedom

It's now been a week and a half, nearly two weeks, since I quit the day job. And so far, it's appeared that that was exactly the right thing to do.

It's not really the time issue. I estimate that I work maybe 8-9ish hours a day of actual productive time on Diffle, broken into 3 hours or so when I first wake up, another 2 hours or so before dinner, and then 3-4 hours at night. I certainly couldn't do that with a day job, but it's only a factor of two or so more than I could manage in my spare time, and my productivity is way more than a factor of two higher.

Rather, it's what it does to my attention span. Before, those 4 hours a day were broken into 45 minutes or so before work, 45 minutes before dinner, and maybe two hours after dinner when I'm all tired out. By the time I actually get into the work, the amount of usable time is really more like zero. So essentially all useful work was done on weekends.

Also, I find that I'm thinking much more clearly. I'd stumbled around for about 2 months as to an overall architecture for game editor + JavaScript version + Flash version. It came to me about 2 days after quitting my day job. My code is cleaner and nicely factored. Mike remarked at how simple and intuitive the hangman prototype I put together is.

Anyway, a quick list of things I've done since quitting:

• jQuery documentation & dependency tool
  
• YC News in polar coordinates - the cloudmaps stuff didn't really work right (despite spending a few days on it), so I replaced it with a simple polar plot during DevHouseBoston. Was generally a success; did most of it during the hackathon, cleaned it up and added a couple other features in the two days afterwards, and posted it on news.YC. Will include in our YC app as a cool hack.
• Hangman prototype - it took about 2-3 days to get up-to-speed with MTASC, Swfmill, and ActionScript. I've got a basic fluency now, along with a prototype. Converting it to JavaScript took only a couple hours, and now I'm working on a compiler to generate both from the same source.

Also thought out a distributed architecture for storing games and such.

Am about to start working on the YC app. Mike did a draft last week, now we have to condense things down, since it's too wordy.

Also should start a post with a list of all the mistakes we've made. There's a tendency to white-wash the past, so might as well get them all down while they're fresh and painful. Might be interesting, and hopefully we can avoid making them again.