I hate working alone. I shouldn’t be doing this project alone. I have emotional issues from childhood that are tweaked by working alone. They’re uncomfortable and distracting. Okay, painful and distracting.

But they’re just emotional issues, rattling around in my brain. The work needs to be done and I have no one beside me at the moment. The solution is to pretend that I’m an adult and do what needs to be done. In two months I’ll turn 59. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

Yes, I have a partner. But he’s working on the marketing. I need help with the code.

I am strung out from lack of sleep. Historically, I’ve “needed” my sleep. My responsibilities are hugely cerebral. Lack of sleep is debilitating. But these people in India I’ve tried to work with work midnight to 8am my time. So I’ve tried to stay up. It’s not working very well…

My arms hurt from typing. I have old RSI’s from computer use. I have to be careful. They can be debilitating. I hate the feeling of wanting to rip my skin off. I’m exhausted, but I’ll try working at my standing desk today, and using an ergonomic keyboard. Using the laptop while reclining isn’t too bad, but it’s not good…

I learned one new (to me) technology last week (PL/SQL), when I couldn’t find a cheap consultant to help (can’t afford an expensive one.)  Luckily, it was a small project. And I’ll use it for two more things.

The people that I hired did what they knew to do, instead of what I asked, so their code is too slow. It won’t scale. It’ll start slowing down with 1000 users. We need to build for at least 100k, more like 10m. They gave me a bogus, high estimate for fixing it. There’s no integrity in that, no partnership.

Their communication sucks. Mine’s much better, but not great. I explain at length, written. Somehow, we need to talk… I needed to work with them, and didn’t realize it…

I am starting to work with a new guy, in India, at a different company. His name is Rags (the ‘a’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in bogs.) He has a manager named Jay. But he can’t start for another 36 hours…

Today I will try to dive into angularJS + nodeJS. Just for two hours. You have no idea how much I hate JS. It’s bad and wrong. There are tons of convoluted interfaces. JS defines them sloppily. It’s easy to make mistakes, and very difficult to figure out what’s wrong and how things should be. The debugging is primitive. There are tools for it, but to me they seem to take an endless amount of setup, also convoluted and poorly documented. So I’m going to try to change some code without a debugger…

Yesterday I added a new method to a module. Node barfed. I tried to load the project into Eclipse for help. It hung. I downloaded a newer version, but haven’t tried it yet…  I should probably try the other IDE. I can’t even remember its name…  The team uses netbeans. I know nothing about that, but have heard weird things…

I started to create a Vertx.io project- it’s a nodeJS-like system, but for Java. Maybe I should redo the backend in Java. Vertx looks pretty decent. I started reading about their MySql support. They don’t support stored procedures, sigh… I suppose I could make a small table and insert the procedure parameters into it, and make a trigger that runs the procedure. I don’t know anything about triggers, but it might work…

My mood is very black at times. I don’t take it seriously, but it’s unpleasant and unhelpful. I hate working alone. Hopefully I can end this complaining and start concentrating.

The plan for today. Set my timer for 90 minutes and launch into NodeJS. When it rings, I have to decide whether to try to finish or back it out. Then I’ll make a plan for what needs to be done to get to beta. Maybe it’ll help to tell you, now.

• Switch over to my schema, fix up 3-4 queries.
• Change the mysql library to mysql2 and use their prepared statements.
• Add some monitoring/measuring technology.
• Add an admin page and some status info.
• Thoroughly test the join/signin stuff and get it working smoothly.
• Thoroughly test the pages for small screens (aka “responsive”)
• Assess and probably tweak the feel of the UI.

Oh, and pay the bills. There’s not much savings left. But I can’t worry about that. Though I have to…

Thanks for listening.