The last two weeks have been spent on drawing up features to further the cause behind BOLT and implementing them. Quite frankly, this last 2 week period was one of the toughest ones I have been through with BOLT.
I set myself a huge goal on what updates to bring into BOLT, originally in one week. These updates included DMs, the BOLT camera, and countless small tweaks and performance changes. As you could have guessed it wasn't as simple as that. With the camera and DMs I spent time learning and reading up documentation to ensure I chose the most optimal method to implement them. Developing them was another beast to tackle, coding to later just control a, delete, and start from scratch again. Thankfully, I can say that eventually the pieces fell together and everything went according to plan, well a couple of days later than expected.
The main struggle for me was to stay fully motivated and work efficiently. I'm not going to lie and say that I never felt overwhelmed or slightly unmotivated, I do. Especially when other factors outside of the task at hand also play a role. Nevertheless, it came down to my passion for BOLT.
One thing that I have learned to be critical is to TAKE A BREAK. Working 24/7 with no breaks will hurt you more than it helps. We are not machines, even a computer's CPU after hours of tasks will overheat and need time to cool. I found that by stretching and working without breaks (not minutes or hours, I mean a day or two) it took me longer to complete tasks and my output quality was not as good. So, I ended up taking Thanksgiving break to truly step away from my computer and rejuvenate. To my surprise I ended up thinking of features and new ideas for BOLT just by strolling around, and ended up coming back more motivated and excited to develop than ever before.
Finding a work-life balance is extremely crucial and at the end of the day, at least for me, taking time to simply relax ends up making you far more productive.
Back to BOLT, when it comes to programming specifically, I found it extremely useful to do two things, diversify where you code and also work on 2 or 3 tasks in one session. Writing all your code in one place, especially when the project reaches 100,000+ lines can be detrimental, one mistake can lead to hours of debugging. Looking over smaller and structured files helps A LOT. Secondly, working on one thing at a time can cause fatigue and often might lead to you producing a sub-optimal result. I found it useful to work on 2-3 tasks in a certain period of time. As I worked on a new topic every time, making it interesting, and gave me the chance to take a fresh look at each topic when I eventually circled back it.
That's it for these last two weeks of development on BOLT.
Dec 2023,
Darsh