10 July — Preoccupation
Dear journal,
This problem is sort of annoying.
How do you even display this data? I could — and, when I’m rational enough, should — give up on this format of displaying it. It doesn’t work well on the web, certainly not with the spatial constraints we have for the page. But it is what they originally wanted, and I can’t shake the compulsion to at least make it work first before giving up on it.
What it is is a set of four categories — industries the client targets — and a bunch of subsets of each of those. They have them as a title (Industries), subtitles (the four entries), and then bulleted lists (the specific fields in each) in their copy, but they have a powerpoint with a graphic with “Industry” in a bubble in the center and the four categories named as overlays of the corners of a rectangle that takes up the rest of the slide.
What I want to do is to re-create the latter, and make it so that hovering over any of the industries causes a list to pop up that covers the other three industry titles, and that list contains the sub-categories for the one being hovered over. It’d be a kind of neat effect, and it definitely involves figuring out how to do things I didn’t know how to do before (a fair amount of that, really, given I managed to spend the only time I considered working on two days last week just reading about different CSS and javascript that might make it possible).
However, that slide was just that — a slide — and so had a landscape orientation. The space this is being displayed in on the website is the same as that of the other content; it gets a portrait-orientation section taking up about 1/3 of the right-hand side of the screen. The whole premise looks kind of weird in that configuration; things look smooshed. And I’ve banged away at it for a while but still don’t have it looking like it should (the list only fades away into box-shadow on the non-cut-out corners) or working like it should (I hid the element with “visibility: hidden” so it doesn’t exist on the page for the JS to find on page load, and need to change that to size or something).
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And yet…I don’t know that I will defeat the compulsion to keep working on it. I should give it up; I should instead spend the time making the lists pretty in a way that works well, and giving some neat animation to whatever that is. That’s the sane thing to do, that’s what’d benefit the client the most, that’s what ultimately I’m likely to change it to after getting this working and showing it to the client and them being like… “eh, it doesn’t really look right, can you do something else?”
In my career in the past I had less challenge giving this up. I don’t know if that is because I find this work more inherently interesting than the work I’d done for employers, because the executive function adderall gives me is accompanied by a compulsion to finish what I start, some mixture of both, or something else altogether. But it is kind of interesting; I’ve told devs on my teams to stop it and move on in exactly this kind of scenario as they endlessly fiddle with something that should work but is just taking too long; I, historically, have been able to quit and move on when I recognize it’s the best thing to do.
Maybe some of it is that this project has pretty nebulous deadlines, a very accommodating client, and the timeline for my future is as opaque as ever. I haven’t exactly done a masterful job of requirements-gathering here; I think in my head at least that was initially perceived to be a concession to the artistic process, as this website creation is much more artistic than commercial application development. This is highly visual, and subject to taste, and so back-and-forth with the client as abstractly described appearances become concrete seemed pretty reasonable. And it still does. But without hard deadlines or delivery dates it does lend itself towards a timeline that spirals out indefinitely.
And that is something I cannot afford.
As long as the client continues to be pretty flexible about delivery time, sure, it’s probably not a problem if I waste the time to learn/figure out/fix this graphic so it displays as I intended, or mostly as I intended; I waste a few days on it, then move on to creating something actually deliverable, and chalk it up to time spent learning interesting and potentially valuable lessons about CSS I can intend to employ in the future.
But it isn’t the rational business decision on this project. And, as someone who had always done software dev in the past not out of a sense of interest or fun, but to get paid, I’d rarely struggled to just opt for the rational business decision at every juncture. And it’s interesting that at least one of the differences between that and what I am doing now has changed that.
With distracted love, preoccupied kisses, and inattentive hugs,
Businessboy
