Passion like a Fire

This weekend I woke up a project I started and abandoned in 2017 to see what work it would take to it get working again. In roughly 24 hours of work on a Saturday I modified 41 files and deployed it live to "https://destinystatus.com".

This helped bring to memory the probably 50 projects I've started, worked immensely on in a short period of time and then abandoned. This doesn't bother me, because a few of those projects survive the notion of time and are continually developed unlike the abandoned ones.

Though, the reason for this blog post is an interesting topic. Someone asked me what was the point of building something was when the intended audience was myself. There is a lot of time that goes into some of these projects, but they aren't marketed or make money. If anything, the monthly cost of hosting them costs me money. So why do I do it?

To that answer - I have no idea. So instead I want to talk about a project I did.

Meet PandaLove Trials

This was a custom built feature that pulled completed games from Bungie as matches in Destiny ended. It wasn't smart enough to pull them automatically, but required manual entry of the game ids that could be obtained from the URL. So lets talk about this game feature.

It was known as Trials of Osiris and required 9 wins in a row (without a loss) in order to visit "The Lighthouse". A special place reserved for those who could complete the challenge. Boons were added to the game with the following:

• Start with a win
• First win counts as two
• First loss is ignored

So you could technically make it with only 7 wins. It became a challenge in our group of friends to see how many times we could visit The Lighthouse in the few days it was available every week.

As we succeeded, it was very interesting to read the post game reports and compare our stats. The first iterations of this site were very bare, but I continued to evolve it until what you see below.

This had a lot of things going on:

• Logo of that match for each player
• A green hint for positive KD, and red hint for negative (or zero)
• A smiley face if you didn't die
• Automatically ordered based on KD.

This site built kept me playing this game for months to come. The game started changing so updates to the site did as well. We introduced the notion of a "perfect" game, where the enemy team never scored and added support for trials that switched maps.

After doing this for 100+ times, the amount of analytics was insane. We knew the rough amount of time it would take per map. The average death/kills per person per map. Just talking about it seems like I was very passionate about making something that only about 8 people ever used.

So transitioning back to the point at hand. I started googling "passion" and Google auto-completed to "Passion without purpose is like a shot without a target." which was a quote by Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha. This quote is very interesting to me, because the target portion is basically saying - "If you are taking a shot without a target, then why are you even shooting?"

So applying that back to passion is basically saying - "If you have no purpose, then what is the point of passion?" and this is where I disagree. I have the passion to work on something, which is basically just motivation. The purpose is fulfillment for something I thought wasn't possible become possible. Wrap all of this together and I have the motivation/passion to work on a project, even though it may end up abandoned.