Finish Him


There are two little words that most of 80's/90's children are too familiar with; "Finish Him!".  Boys (or men now) are more familiar with these words because they were part of the popular game fighting game Mortal Kombat. In the game you could play against the computer or against another person using characters from the game.  All characters shared common moves such as punching, kicking and jumping but each character had special power moves that gave them advantages over their opponents.

The game consisted of fighting for three rounds.  The player that beat their opponent for two of the three rounds won.  On the final round, once the losing opponent was defeated, the game provided an opportunity for a finishing move.  At this point the player would lose with or without a finishing move or even without a hit at all.  This was just an opportunity for the player to show off his skills with his special finishing move. Any hit would finish the opponent but a special finishing move was really cool eye candy that humiliated the losing opponent. The opportunity for finishing the losing opponent was limited by time. If the winning opponent failed to deliver a finishing move within the provided time limit, the losing opponent would simply kill over and fall.

I've been listening a lot to John Sonmez quite a bit lately.  He is a well respected speaker on developer productivity and self improvement through personal marketing.  In one blog post John mentions that one of his strongest attributes is finishing what he starts or rather completing what he starts. That got me thinking that is one of my biggest weaknesses. I love to start a lot of things but I have personal problem that I struggle with and that is finishing those things.


In the past I've started several projects such as Socrie - An anonymous chat channel website, which you can find at socrie.herokuapp.com.  I started a machine learning project which I gave up due to other priorities.  I started an Arduino project that allows you to use the Arduino as a walking stick which I call the magic wand. I started a different Arduino project that allows you to transmit data over FM. The list goes on.  The three common things about these projects is that I know how to finish them, I didn't finish them and they were all personal pet projects. I simply lost the motivation and just stopped working them.  This is a huge problem.

Now don't get me wrong.  I don't not finish my day job projects. In fact, I have an excellent record for delivering what I start professionally, but when given the opportunity to finish my personal projects, they simply become too boring and too tedious to finish.  I have reasons to not finish them, other priorities, family events, but really they are all just excuses.  

I cannot expect to one day create something really cool if I don't finish what I start.  So today from this day forward I declare that I will finish everything that I start. In fact I actually started an asteroids javascript game a couple of months ago and proudly can say that I finished it.  You can check out the game at http://searchandrescue.apphb.com/main.html.  I even put it on the chrome store you can get it at Search and Rescue.  Quicly after that I started another game that you may know as pacman. I plan to change it totally to be different and avoid violating any copyright laws but for now you can check it out at http://pacroids.apphb.com/main.html. It's currently a work in progress. I plan to start nothing else until I finish that game.

So all this is to say that from this day forward you can expect two things from me finishing what I start and consistency.  I pledge to write one blog post every week ready for you every Monday of the week and to finish every project that I start.  I will have your help and remember those two little words in my head "Finish Him!".


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