Off my chest - March 2022

Hi.

If you are impatient, don’t have the time, do not bother reading, whatever: go to the TL;DR. But you won’t understand why this post exists.

Now let’s get straight to the point. The progress on this project is painfully slow. Every time the motivation is there, something goes in my way and eats up a lot of time. This lead to the situation where I make promises and I never fulfill them. Pressure accumulates, and stress too. My health gets impacted. It is far, oh far from being the main reason, but my point is that it plays a role.

At the same time, most if not every single feature requires great refactoring, because of the codebase. Such a shitty codebase full of hacks, may I say. An architecture that is nonsense. While I am trying to do my best to update it towards a good architecture, and also better code (DRY principle, less global variables, everything in modules, tests, reconsider what should actually be private in classes, cleaner way to handle DOM events, security, etc.), the facts are there. I lag behind. And at the same time, it is required to move forward.

Why is it like that? Well this project was started during high school, before attending a computer science degree. So it was built on bad fundations. And seeing it now, it hurts my perfectionism.

It isn’t fun anymore, because I am not really working on audio stuff, or new features, I am trying to clean up what can’t be. All the time. It is just refactoring after refactoring, and it looks like it is going nowhere. The best would be to rewrite it from scratch. But for what? Redoing two years of work? To maybe get the same situation? Meanwhile, in fact, many other tools can do the same, often better.

But wait, there’s more. As I already said before, I am dealing with wrist pain. What a great source of frustration. Having the willingness to work on projects, being creative, and then being brought back to reality by pain.

All of this to say, I donn’t know if and how much I will keep working on Wav2Bar. I can’t say yes, because of what I said above. I can’t say no, because I don’t know if and when the motivation to work on it will come. Some of it is still there, refactoring is sometimes satisfying in some way. But if there wasn’t any problem, I wouldn’t be writing these lines.

However, what I know is that I don’t want to be bound to one project. I want to work on whatever pleases me when I want to. Because all this effort is on my free time. So it should be some good time, where I enjoy every single bit of it. That is especially important as my free time isn’t infinite and quite small.

TL;DR: It became very hard to work on Wav2Bar and the future is uncertain.

Ok, now is the time to talk about you. If you didn’t read any of the above, then the most important is probably in this paragraph. If it is important for you to own a software being regularly updated, Wav2Bar is not the tool for you. If you don’t care if updates will ever come, and you are just happy when one of those geos out, whatever it can be; then Wav2Bar is still a nice and functional tool, that can achieve the basics of video editing for music publication.

You probably are disappointed. I am sorry. I can’t keep it that way when it isn’t going well, and when the negative outweight the positive. So, I hope you understand me.

I learnt a ton of stuff in the process, and that is to me the most important. The rest is bonus, and I am very grateful for it, especially for the positive feedback I got. Seeing the tool being used is the most rewarding gift.

Take care of yourself and your relatives.

~ Picorims

PS: I will probably update the README and the licence someday to accomodate to this post.

news — Mar 19, 2022 - 22:39:19, Updated on Mar 19, 2022 - 22:39:19

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