Andy Gapin

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Last week I didn’t do an electronic log for my radio show so I couldn’t easily copy and paste my playlist here. And nothing really that eventful has happened so meh. Though, I figured I’d put a little update here nonetheless.

Anyone who knows me knows that I put way too much of my time into a piece of software that I’ve been developing for the radio station that I volunteer at. I’ve spent thousands of hours writing code and debugging it. Most of which has been during free time at work. But more so than time, I’ve invested almost every bit of my sanity that I have. If you have done any software coding, then you know that it can really drive you crazy trying to get things to work sometimes.

Pretty early on, it had been suggested that I try to sell the software to other radio stations. With all of the time and energy that I’ve put into this, it’d be almost silly not to. So that became the ultimate goal for me. I would use RLC, the station I volunteer at, as my testing ground for the software. They would always get to use it for free and, in exchange, I’d get to have a live environment to test the software in.

This March will mark two years since the software first went live (development started in the beginning of December 2005) and I still can’t even imagine trying to sell what I have yet. The list of what my software currently does is pretty impressive thus far:

• Music library databasing
• Review system for music
• Logging of everything that goes over the air
• Storing of contact information for DJs as well as external contacts
• A bulletin system
• A system for reporting and managing issues with equipment and music
• Meeting minutes
• Logging phone calls
• Generating FCC required reports of community affairs programming

The list goes on from there, but those are the major functions…so far. The list of ideas that I have for where to go next is simply crazy.

Right now, there is nothing else out there that can do this much for college radio stations, I could sell this software with no competition. So why am I not selling it yet?

I have set many goals for myself for dates to have this software ready to go by. Every time I get close to one, I push it back another six months to a year. Currently, I am looking at getting this software out the door by September. We’ll see how that goes.

The problem is that every time I add a new feature, I come up with another “essential” feature that I feel NEEDS to be added before I can sell it. Or I find a bug in an existing feature that I need to change. This process becomes endless.

Couple that with the fact that when I started this project, I picked up coding again for the first time in over four years and had to learn many skills that I had never learned the first time. I had to learn multiple new languages as well as database skills that I never to begin with. In fact, data systems were one of the reasons I originally lost interest in computer science back when I was in high school. Because of this, I pretty much had very little idea what I was doing when I started. As the project progressed, so did my skills. I learned more. I got more efficient. Now when I go back to work on things and I see old bits of code, it kills me to look at them. They’re terrible! So I feel that I need to rewrite them and make them better. This has become an obsession that I cannot control.

This isn’t even limited to the code that I wrote prior to v1.0. The software is currently at v3.1.1 and I routinely find coding that makes me cringe from v2.5 or even v3.0. It’s become an endless cycle. I spend more time revamping old bits than I do adding in new ones. The two major functions of the software, music databasing/searching and program logs have both had complete redesigns of the user interface already. I’m very happy with these redesigns and I think that they were necessary, but I can’t stop there. I’m working on redoing the permissions system now. This system is one of the very basic systems that holds the entire project together. Revamping it is literally requiring me to go through tens of thousands of lines of code one by one.

So when will it end? When will I be able to just say “alright, this is ready to hit the market!”

I was reading an interview with Bill Gates today from Engadget discussing his leaving Microsoft and there was something that really hit me:

Well, of course! But are you personally fully satisfied with it?
I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

Like the saying, “Software is never complete, only abandoned”?
There are always the features that I wanted to get in, or the things that I wish were a little more polished. The people who are good in these companies are really sort of ridiculously demanding people. They have to sort of know when to back off so that thing can eventually ship. But I look at any product — and I’m better at Microsoft products — and say what I wished what was better about the product.

Now this is something that I need to learn! I need to be able to take a step back and say “alight, people will buy this as it is and the other features can come in the next version.”

Since I decided that I want to sell this software, it has become a dream/goal of mine to start my own software company and go beyond this. But I don’t think that can happen if I can never get software out the door.

So Bill, show me the light! Teach me how to ship something that isn’t perfect, and never could be, in my eyes!

I can’t believe that it’s 2008 already! I could swear that it was June only a few weeks ago! 2007 flew by so fast. It was a crazy year too. I had a lot of change in my life and in the things around my life as well…

The relationship that I was in for almost five years ended and I started a new one a few months later with the girl who I had met and become best friends with earlier in the year. I was “promoted” to a new position at my job. The radio station upgraded it’s signal by leaps and bounds. I got a new roommate. I reached a point where I could actually start saving money, albeit not a whole lot, while affording a decent apartment and all of my loans. I started this blog. And this is just what I can think of off of the top of my head right now. In the end, I would have to say that 2007 was a pretty good year for me and looking back, even though there were some really hard decisions that I had to make, I’m pretty happy about it.

Looking forward, 2008 is going to be starting off with a bang…literally. Just a few minutes after midnight when we lit off hundreds of fireworks to bring in the new year and I’m surprised that New Brunswick is still standing after it. I also am kind of surprised that there have yet to be any casualties during this New Year’s tradition.

In about a week and a half, I’m going to be going to San Fransisco. It’s a business trip, but it looks like I’ll have plenty of time to see the city and do fun things. I already got a ticket to see Cirque du Soleil. So that should be fun. I’m also planning a trip to Chicago over Memorial Day weekend and a road trip to Toronto to go see Evil Dead: The Musical again. I’m really excited to see it again since it was pretty much the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I also will probably be going to Vermont for a couple days and I’m trying to make it to Cedar Point later in the year. And as usual, I’ll probably be doing the radio station retreat to the Poconos.

Now that I’m actually writing all of these down, I can’t believe how many places I’ll be going to this year. Most of them will just be weekend trips, but still, it’s exciting! In the past five years, I haven’t really gone anywhere outside of NJ, PA, NYC so it’ll be nice to get away a bit. I used to go places more often, but in the past few years it just didn’t happen.

Beyond all of that, I will probably scale back my role at the radio station and for the first time in years, not have an elected position.

I don’t really believe much in New Year’s resolutions, since they tend to be the kind of thing that last no more than a few weeks. I also don’t think that you need a new year to make change in your life. However, there are a few things that I want to change with this year. I want to read more. I love reading, but it’s just something that I never find the time to do. So I’m going to try to find, or make, the time to do it more. I want to start exercising more, even if that just means that I start mountain biking regularly again. I got out on the trails a couple times in 2007, but if I could got at least a couple times a month in 2008, that would be awesome. And lastly, at some point this year, I want to get my software ready to be sold to other radio stations.

I also want to continue something that I started in 2007. I want to try new things. I started liking Thai food and, to a degree, sushi in 2007 and I’d like to try out more foods as well. I also want to do and experience new things beyond food too.

While I’m sure that things will be just as hectic as they always are for me, I am looking forward to living a life with a lot less stress this year. I think that some of the changes that happened in 2007 will help this happen in 2008 and taking a step back at the radio station can’t hurt either.

Cheers to 2008!

I have been stressed as all hell since Thursday. There was a major crisis with my software at the radio station. Every time that I thought I had things all fixed and back up and running, I would find more and more problems or half the staff would email me with problems. I finally think that I have everything working again though. Turns out that the webhost upgraded their database server to a new version which processes things a littler differently. Had they said something about this, there would not have been so many problems.

My brain hates me anymore.

We’ve started work on the rebuild of our production studio at the radio station. Over the course of the last two Sundays, we’ve completely emptied out the room and put all of the equipment into storage. It was a long process just to get everything out, but it was also fun to find all of the old stuff in there from way back when. There were a lot of little bits of history in there.

I am a little sad to see it go though. When I first started at the station in the Fall of 2001, that was the air studio. As crappy as it was, it was awesome to me. I had fun just being on the radio. The next Spring when we got the new studio on the air, it was like going from rags to riches, but there was always part of me that was tied to the now production studio. That’s not to say that I didn’t hate having to do shows in there when there was training going on. Nothing would EVER work when I went in there and my shows would sound horrible, but it sure kept me on my toes!

In a few weeks, we should have the new furniture installed and then we can start putting all of the equipment in. I’m pretty excited for this actually. As nerdy as it sounds, the new studio is going to look bad ass. When you’re sitting at the console, you will have racks filled with equipment on either side of you and four LCD screens in front of you. There will be a screen for Google’s automation system, Pro Tools, ELCRo (my software) and a general use one for the general production computer. It’s going to be intense! And I can’t say that having the design tweaked to have a dedicated computer for the software that I created isn’t a bit flattering.

Check the slideshow for what we’ve done so far.