Breaking old projects with updates

Up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Whidham. You can find me at Peter Witham dot com. This episode is a bit of a warning here, and it's related to some old projects that I opened up.

So this week, I had been going through and decided it was time to go back and look at a couple of projects I'd worked on in the past and bring them back to life. Right? I felt it had been long enough and they needed some work done to them to move them forward. 1 was some updates, another was just progressing the project since it had never been released to the public. And along the way, I thought, well, you know, it's been a long time and I have updated versions of the tools that I'm using.

One of them was a game engine, the other is just some coding tools. So I went ahead and opened up these projects. So naturally, they give me a warning saying, you know, these projects were last opened in old versions. Are you sure you want to open them? Do you want to update them to the new standard for these newer tools?

So, of course, I'm like, yeah, let's go ahead and do that and open up the projects. Now, in the case of the game one, everything looked fine. Everything was mostly fine. However, what I had failed to take into account was the latest version of the software that I had installed, some of the plugins, right, some of the add ons I was using for this game had not been updated to the latest version. Now this immediately causes a problem, of course, because the app tries to run or you try to compile it and it's like hey, you're using this plug in that doesn't exist in this version and therefore I'm just gonna give you a bad day.

It's kind of the short version of what happens. Now interestingly, I was able to recover by going back to an older version that I knew the plugins were compatible with so no problem there. But it serves as a very cautionary tale that as I've said before having the latest software and using the latest software is not always a good thing especially with existing projects. Now, of course, naturally you're a lot safer if you are creating brand new projects with those newer versions because you don't have to worry about these incompatibilities and because the tools won't make available the things that are not installed naturally. Right?

So So you're not gonna have these problems. Thankfully, like I say, I was able to roll it back to the previous version of the software which works just fine with the plugins and the project loaded, compiled. Everything was just fine running nicely. No no big deal there. And it's also a reminder for those of you who don't do this, why even as a solo developer you should use source control.

Because imagine that I couldn't roll back and I didn't have this code in source control. Well now I'm kind of screwed right because I've gone forward and I can't go back and now I've got completely broken software until the plugins are updated and then again what if these plugins are not updated then I I'm just stuck. Right? I got to find ways around these problems and basically a lot of the project that I had written it's not going to work and I would have to find new ways to do that and probably consume a whole bunch of time and even then I may not be able to do it. So just putting this out there just as a reminder to you all, right, learn from me on this one.

Think twice before you use the latest software, right? I've said this before in other episodes, you know, it can really ruin your day. And thankfully if you're lucky like me, you'll have a way to go backwards and be fine. But that's not always the case. So think before you leap or think before you upgrade.

Okay? Working on a whole bunch of new updates for a whole bunch of new applications. My job finder tracker app. I've got a new resume feature in there in testing at the moment. I think it's finally ready to ship after a lot of trial and error and reworking to find a way that I wanted to do it.

So I'm probably gonna talk about that in the future once it gets released, but it's on test flight for Ios right now and we will see how that goes, but I'm feeling pretty good about it. Unfortunately, now I'm in the area of needing to do the marketing material, updating the web pages, updating the screenshots, maybe making some videos. These are the areas that often take the most amount of time sometimes. Ironically, you know, building the software as I've said before is kind of the easy part in many ways. Right?

I do all the marketing in that myself because I earn any money from these things. I wish I did to pay someone else to do it and probably they would do an infinitely better job than me, so I have to do it all myself and it takes me a long time. I enjoy doing it, but sometimes, you know, it's a very new area for me and something that I'm definitely not specialized in. So I know that I don't do the best job on that. It's gonna be interesting.

It is something that I'm gonna take on and see what I can do there and and learn from others hopefully. So we'll see how it goes. But I really want to ship that before the end of the year, get that off the books because I'm probably about 4 months overdue from shipping it where I wanted to be originally for various reasons. So you know, it's just gonna be great for me if I can get that off the books by the end of the year. Other than that folks, have a great one.

I'm enjoying the long weekend here thanks to Thanksgiving in the US and it's really afforded me a lot of time to get a lot of this stuff in place and to work on these things without the stress and pressure of knowing, oh my gosh, I gotta go to work tomorrow and therefore, you know, I can feel more relaxed and focus on them, spend a little maybe more hours in the evening than I should. So with that, I will speak to you in the next one.