Introducing Umbrella
Today, I'm introducing Umbrella. It is the recursive system that powers the DoleeArts umbrella. It is written from scratch using Go, and hosted on App Engine.
The goal of Umbrella is to keep an individual motivated to ship products. Or, like what Justin Jackson said, Just Fucking Do It.
The solution here is to have the Umbrella system as the partner. It is inspired by Devine Lu Linvega's amazing work on XXIIVV.
The system consists of Projects. There are currently threes types of projects:
- Diaries
- Games
- Systems
Each project contains zero or more of the following axises:
- Issues, tasks of the project.
- Journal, timed pieces of the project's information.
- Logs, time logs spent on the project.
All the projects are public, and its axises will be slowly made available for public consumption.
Introducing DevLog
Update on November 12, 2015: DevLog is considered being replaced by Umbrella.
Before talk about this DevLog, I feel it is necessary to say a little bit about DoleeArts first.
DoleeArts is the name of my side project. It came from a simple idea: I should really start to make something, anything, but seriously, with love and long term commitment. It is actually not one project, but a series of projects.
So what are they? Well, first thing is this website. It is built from scratch using Go and Bootstrap, and is hosted on App Engine. It has a home page, the Linked List(inspired by Daring Fireball), and now the DevLog. You can also subscribe site-wide updates via this feed.
Besides the website, I also decided to make video games. After taking a game design course at my graduate school, I was fascinated by this industry. I can’t wait to step into it.
Currently I’m working on a mobile game called Memory Cube. I don’t have much experience on making games now and this is only my very first official game, so I don’t expect it to be very attractive. My ultimate goal is just to finish and release it, and at the same time to learn game development from this process.
However, the development stopped every now and then. It has been almost a year since I started the game, and I still haven’t finished it yet.
Why? Why on earth can’t I just fucking finish it?
Lately I find out it is actually hard to make progress on anything if I’m just in my house staring at my computer screen and only thinking on my own, especially when the game is simple and I started to suffer from aesthetic fatigue.
After weeks of procrastination and randomly reading other developers’ blogs, I realized that writing is a good potential solution to this issue. One can be benefited from writing in many different ways. But for me, the most important one is it plays the role of commitment to my audiences. Of course, the most important (and likely the only, because of my poor linguistic performance and competence) audience is myself. I believe I will be unconsciously influenced by this public commitment, and actually be pushed forward.
So, here is DevLog. My writings on the progress of my side projects, DoleeArts.
In the next post I will talk about Memory Cube. Stay tuned.