Most coders and programmers are familiar with the concept of “flow” or “getting in the zone.” In a nutshell, it’s a mental state you get in when you’re working on something where it almost becomes effortless. This state can be difficult to achieve, and usually takes the right combination of energy level, motivation, and little or no distractions. Once you get there, however, you’ll do your best work. When I get in the zone, I lose track of time and forget to eat until Annie notices that I haven’t left the computer all day.
The reason I bring this up is that I haven’t gotten in the zone for a personal project in well over a year. I hadn’t really noticed until this last weekend, when I spent over twenty hours coding. Annie and Zoe went to Centralia for the day to go shopping with her mom, and I stayed home. I went into the computer room at 10am, and I stayed in there coding until 4am. Even then, I was still deep in the zone and I didn’t want to stop, but I could tell I was tired because it was taking me too long to do everything. I slept for about four hours, and woke up eager to get back to it. I was supposed to be helping out with Zoe, but every chance I got that day, I sneaked back into the computer room to put a little more time it.
(As an aside, I would like to mention that my lovely wife is awesome. I felt terrible that I wasn’t helping out as much as I should, especially given that Zoe is both teething and recovering from an ear infection at the moment, so she’s really clingy. Even so, Annie knew that I don’t get into this headspace very often, and was really understanding about it.)
It was effortless. My mind was completely absorbed in the code I was writing, and even now, I’m completely jazzed about going home to work on it some more.
What I’m working on is a wordpress theme, which I’m calling Dojo. It’s an attempt to create a stable code platform that I can put on all the wordpress sites I maintain, and completely customize with just a CSS file.
Right now, it’s not much to look at. I intentionally stripped all images and CSS so that I could focus on the markup to make sure it’s a solid base to work from. Still, if you’re interested, you can check it out on the dev site.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more about this, including some challenges I found with the markup, the admin module, and the design process.
