Lord Matt

This is a story about how you should appreciate those people in your life that aren’t afraid to say, “You should know better.”

I maintain and contribute to Anime Dream, a web site founded by my friend Nicole as the japanese-animation arm to RPGFan.com. I came on board shortly after AD became a standalone web site, despite the fact that I had just graduated with a computer science degree and knew nothing about the entertainment business. But hey, my job at the site was technical, so my reviews for the site were a bonus!

I think entertainment is a natural source of curiosity for people of all ages, but that’s a low-level emotion that tends to cause trouble. I had no idea what I was getting into, and wouldn’t for a couple years.

Entertainment reviews are simple in form and content, but the gap between good-enough reviews and good reviews is difficult to cross. A person can become a competent reviewer quickly, but spend many reviews getting good at it. Content-management software is fundamentally simple, but the gap between doing the right function and facilitating users is difficult to cross. A programmer can glue some logic to a database quickly, and spend years trying to make the thing useful. Image editing appears to be simple at first, but in practice is difficult in every way imaginable.

Today I attempt all of those things at once, to keep Anime Dream producing content as well as attempting to improve efficiency. Even ignoring the irregular burden of server maintenance and archivals, it’s not difficult to fathom that any one of these activities is a full-time job. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of effort. I have at least learned an important lesson from it: don’t go into any activity with curiosity or interest alone. Put differently, don’t lose time relearning what you already know.

Anime Dream’s first news updater was a duct-tape solution to the bigger problem of maintaining static content. It made pages well enough, but didn’t keep the unformatted source material in a safe place. Just as photographers save their negatives (or raw digital images) for making visually different prints, a webmaster should save unformatted content for when visual changes are effected on the site. Four years and many days of data entry later, I’ve learned that lesson with AD. I should have known better.

The current content management software is a rewrite of an older updates application. It brings several architectural improvements, to its credit and mine, but unfortunately the ironclad rule that rewrites make software worse applies. Three iterations into the project, the news updates tool doesn’t facilitate news submissions as well as its predecessor. It will take another release before the improvements bear fruit. I should have known better.

Learning not to do what you’ve already done is a hard lesson, and there’s a harder one: learning to use what you already know in a new undertaking. Most of us do so partially, or not at all. Healthy enthusiasm comes not from curious interest, but from a convergence of principles. There’s no harm in being curious about the experience of contributing to an anime web site, if you don’t plan to actually do it. If crossing the threshold into action seems attractive, only disciplined practice gets results. I already knew how to write a review before ever doing it, but I didn’t consider that I might know how. It’s sort of like peddling backward while going uphill. Careful you don’t lose ground.

The good news is it’s not that hard to make continuous progress, even in the face of something new and inviting. There are reusable, efficient practices that will apply in many activities, and you already know how to use them. All it takes to keep growing is conscious effort and a sense of where you are. To relearn everything would be a lot like revisiting childhood — an idea that has appeal to many, but who has the time?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 5:42 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.