I spent pretty much every waking hour this weekend reworking the photo gallery. What a sad way to spend my time off — doing exactly what I do every day when I am working.

It's interesting — even as I checked my watch and realized I had been sitting on my bed in front of a computer for 12 hours straight, it didn't feel like work. It was actually kind of exciting, and what kept me going was the desire to see the result. Perhaps it's pretentious, but it really did feel just like a sculptor must feel as he works. It was very satisfying to start with something rough and ugly and steadily refine it, seeing it take shape in your hands, and watching it slowly come to resemble what you have in your head.

The sad thing, though, is that since what I've been working on was the underpinnings of the code, you probably won't notice; in fact, if I've done my job well, you shouldn't be able to tell any difference at all.

It's kind of like a car: up until now, the photo gallery was like a stripped-down race car — from the outside, it looks more or less like an average car, but inside it's got nothing but the bare minimum required to make it do its job, and it's not pretty.

Now it has become more like a real car — I've gone in and ripped out all that hacked-together mess and replaced it with a thought-out, logically designed infrastructure.

And as with cars, you get some loss in performance with a change such as this — it's hard to maintain the same level of efficiency when switching from procedural to object-oriented design. But BinRock's CPU sits idle nearly all the time, so I'm willing to make a tiny sacrifice in efficiency for the sake of cleanliness and maintainability.

And actually, I think I managed to find a good middle ground, where I don't give up almost any efficiency while still maintaining the clean logical separation of code.