95 percent

Over the last month or two, the number of unpublished posts on this weblog have burgeoned into a small crowd of pieces of writing left near 90 or 95% done. I end up sharing nothing. The reasons for this are manyfold– often times each idea leads back to another and another in recursive ways until I simply cannot say anything due to the fact that I have not done due diligence. I am fearful that my work may contain error. Other times I get excited about some other thing and cannot bring myself back to whatever had held my attention earlier. Admittedly, I am not the best at the last 5 or 10 percent, and have a tendency to rest when things are good enough for me, when the work gets boring or mundane.

This is a pattern that repeats itself in my programming efforts. I tend to leave behind things very special to me without ever sharing them, due to their incompleteness. It is only recently that a friend or two of mine have persuaded me to share these works anyway, even if unfinished. Others have encouraged me to push on through that last 5%, to finish the tasks that need doing, no matter how mundane. When stakes are high the beauty of simple– dumb even– hard work shines best. I want to be good at rising to such tasks, I want to surge past 100% into the 110’s, and, when it is clear that I cannot finish the work on my own, I want to involve others.

What I hope for my future efforts is to finish when necessary, to do the solid, time consuming acts that distinguish a well made thing from a play toy. When this is not possible due to time constraints, I hope to instead share the results of my investigations, un-finished as they are, so that others may be inspired to help out, or so that others may inspire me to finish.

In the next few weeks I’ll be looking back at abandoned projects and texts to see what can be salvaged from the wreckage of my creations. I intend to soon share those things. After that, in my newer work, I hope to begin to follow a certain Mr. Torvalds’ advice to release early and often, to get feedback, invite others into the process, release again. I realize that an approach such as this will expose some of my more sophomoric tendencies, and I am comfortable with that. If the better parts of what I share outweigh the errors, then not all is lost if I have at least invited others to help me fix them.