I’m delighted to share the first project in my thing a week campaign. It’s a simple online game called oraclebot.

Oraclebot is based on a parlor game called oracle. (Try it at your next party– it’s great fun.) The game is a series of questions and answers, each written by someone who’s only seen the previous line. So if you start out with “How’s the weather?” you might get “Cloudy” as your answer; but the next line might get “How’s your vision, grandma?” The humor in the game comes from the way it draws connections between apparently unrelated topics. When the game ends– after a certain number of responses online, or in person when the paper’s full– you read the first question and the last answer:

So, what are you waiting for? Go Play!

Hmm. Still here? Well, I guess I’ll reflect a bit on the course of this project.

How it Went

First, it took a little longer than I expected. I started on it last Sunday, May 4, and I didn’t release a version people could play until this afternoon. I had originally intended to get a ‘beta’ in front of a few people by Friday and to have a public release Monday morning, but instead I had an app with lots of obvious problems on Friday and a very busy weekend. I think I went over schedule for three main reasons:

1. I procrastinated a bit.
2. I injected more technical risk than was really necessary.
3. I had to do a few things related to BarCamp Boston (coming up this weekend, May 17-18!) and a few errands related to leaving my previous job.

Aside from the last one, which is what a corporate report would call a “one-time cost”, these delays were my fault. So I’m going to analyze them here on my blog. Procrastination is the trickiest one; while it seems like I was just too distractable and/or lazy, there’s usually a hidden reason. In this case, I think I was afraid of failure. Of course, procrastination increases the risk of failure, for obvious reasons. But there’s a subtle trade-off: if I failed due to procrastination, I’d have failed for the simple reason of not working enough. But if I worked hard and diligently and still failed to produce something good, I’d be failing at my best. I’m more sensitive to public failure than I’d like to be– it’s hard to contemplate the idea that my best might not be good enough. Apparently that applies even though I’ve set up a working structure where, amid many attempts, some failures are expected.

I think I first admitted this reason to myself on Friday evening. I didn’t procrastinate much afterwards. I got a lot of coding done between the middle of Friday and the middle of today, including most of the dynamic updating features in the game, which allow you to see new games or responses without having to hit reload over and over. These features gave the game a very nice feeling of liveness, but were a lot of trouble to build… mostly because of delay reason #2, excessive technical risk.

I’ll cover the techie stuff in a follow-up article. For now, I have another project to get started on!