Reality check time: FanConcert can't continue to be a full time job. It's just not paying off right away. I still want to continue working on it part time because I think the idea is good but it just needs more work.

If I'm going to continue to work on it part time, the hardest thing will be jumping into it with days off in between. It takes time to get back up to speed, remind yourself where you were and add something new or fix a problem.

Andrew does some great work like that though. He seems to be able to split the project into small enough chunks that when he has a spare half hour (like on the bus) he can jump into that little task. That really helps because then you can truly attack the project in little increments, whenever you have time.

An organized development environment really helps to pull that kind of thing off. You don't want to have to worry about little things every time you jump into the project -- you just want to add something, make sure it doesn't break anything else and maybe deploy it.

A test suite helps tremendously with that, as do development tools that are easy to use and get out of your way. If you can't remember vi commands because you don't use it a lot, use something simpler. Run your project's entire test suite with one step (done) and deploy your project with one step (not done yet, I'd like to use Capistrano).

So I'm going to take a break from new development for a few days and look into the Ruby on Rails environment and some tools that can help me streamline my process. Lucky for me, the Rails community is full of pragmatists that have these same goals in mind. A lot of these types of tools already exist.

It'll take a little time to learn them now but they could save lots of hours in the long run.