- Put "Today's 3 goals" on paper next to your work area.
- Create a new list of 3 for the next day before you leave so you know where you should resume when you come in.
- Using a mindmap helps me break down projects into workable chunks that i can see at a glance. I use Freeplane.
- Pair up! Know what you are good at and what your "weaknesses" are. Then pair with someone who is good at them.
- Consider your approach to work & learning. When I sign up for an online course to learn a new technology, I bore out in no time. Instead, I identify problems to solve and look for ways to solve those problems. This way, I am always learning new tech but directly applying it to problems that matter to me.
- Understand that what some consider a weakness may be your forte. My insatiable desire to learn things to help address problems i encounter in life has been a benefit for me. I understand the capabilities of enough technologies and how to match them to problems that i have a fair bit of patents.
- I have a "career" git project where i store mindmaps, markdown files for notes or other documents that archive past work achievements as well as documenting future job possiblities.
For Barnyard Politics, I used AndEngine. Since then, I have used and loved Unity3D for hard core conceptual prototypes and am in love with Construct 2 now for my current side project though. I am walking my kids through developing and I needed something less complicated than Unity3D. Construct 2's dev environment is fairly easy to use and it exports to html,css, js. Better than that is that I can make my own plugins in js and make them available to people that will create content for my future website / app. I have extremely limited non-corporate time so I plan to author the first content to get started but then make tutorials and allow others to create.
Note: My opinions on game SDKs or anything else here are entirely my own and have nothing to do with my role in the corporate world. The experiences I mention here stem from the fact that I cannot stop programming or thinking about apps when I come home. I love this stuff. And yes, I deeply desire to get to MRR at some point.
$0.00 from my free game "Barnyard Politics" on Android. Immeasurable wealth realizing I could make the game in 4 days with a game sdk verses the whole summer I spent chasing an idea that I never released but used OpenGL, Android NDK, OpenCV. All the technologies I learned led to the next couple years of my work innovating for my employer so it was a good thing. Time well spent.
Long live SDKs, APIs and other ways to get a product out the door without coding every bit myself.
Fun teamwork results from these side projects also. Such as my wife recording her custom mix of "Old McDonald" + "Hail to the Chief" to be used as my background music for the game. She did this at 1AM of election day, 2010 so I could release the app that day.
Can lessons in life be measured as recurring revenue? Maybe not monetarily but certainly in wisdom and the ability to execute better the next time.
- Create a new list of 3 for the next day before you leave so you know where you should resume when you come in.
- Using a mindmap helps me break down projects into workable chunks that i can see at a glance. I use Freeplane.
- Pair up! Know what you are good at and what your "weaknesses" are. Then pair with someone who is good at them.
- Consider your approach to work & learning. When I sign up for an online course to learn a new technology, I bore out in no time. Instead, I identify problems to solve and look for ways to solve those problems. This way, I am always learning new tech but directly applying it to problems that matter to me.
- Understand that what some consider a weakness may be your forte. My insatiable desire to learn things to help address problems i encounter in life has been a benefit for me. I understand the capabilities of enough technologies and how to match them to problems that i have a fair bit of patents.
- I have a "career" git project where i store mindmaps, markdown files for notes or other documents that archive past work achievements as well as documenting future job possiblities.