Pulled my first all-nighter for the startup last night. Hopefully not the first of many, but given we don't even have any customers yet, I have a feeling it will become more common. We are working with a marketing firm to produce a professional video to present the product. Excitement fills the air as we pay the experts to do wonders for us with their expertise. We previously had a promotional video done, by some personal contacts that sometimes do media work for the organization they work for, but they have not done it as a professional service to customers. The marketing firms called that video "cute". It had lighting problems and other quality problems. Funny how when we're not experts in the field, we can hardly tell the difference between "cute" and "effective/high-quality". That's why it's important to find experts that you believe you can trust, give them your money and let them run! ...not with your money, I mean...yeah anyway.
So the features and stability we were looking for in the software for demonstrating it on the video was not coming as quickly as needed, and some last minute spiky hurdles came up. My partner found a good marketing firm through trustworthy contacts in his home country of Brazil, and he's only there for a few more days, so we needed it to work now! So, I wrote the new algorithm we needed, ...then re-wrote the algorithm we needed once I realized romantic musical interpretation threw another stick in my spokes -- yeah, you know how groups of notes are written in the score one after another? well they can be played in order, or reverse in order, reversed I tell you! This project may also reverse my feelings toward music. ...neah. There were of course some other hurdles too, since jumping over a building wasn't enough for the night. After a twenty and a half hour day, we had what we needed! ...though not everything is quite as good yet as I had hoped. So I took a 2-hour nap around 7:30am and started to make a few more tweaks.
Yes, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. I've had to re-write a few of the algorithms, and one in particular, multiple times! I did not foresee all of the many cases music, musical interpretation, wrong notes, score notations, etc. would throw at me. The best thing you can do is try to improve your foresight with your hindsight. So how does one do that anyway? I mean sure you can say, "Well fiddle sticks, I shoulda' thunk a little more about that so I'da' done it that-a-way." But is there a surefire way, a process even, to learn and record better ways of designing and developing your software? No. No there isn't. ...Well yes, of course there is, and there are probably 100s of books and 1000s of articles written on that very topic...for the very industry of software! ...so, you thought I was going to discuss some of these solutions, and leave you with a great new process to adopt, didn't you. I'll definitely be do some thunking over the next week about it, but for now, I'm trying to squeeze one more improvement into the software before the video! So how about for now you go back to work and I'll go back too, K? (...Why do I keep day-dreaming about how nice it'd be to fall over and go to sleep?)