0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

"...ideas are fucking worthless."

...that's what's got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they'd like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don't make it too complicated. Don't spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site... [Andre Torrez, Even You Can Do It]

Just found this post today, via Danny O'Brien. This is why I threw this site together, and why I have a link to ReleaseEarlyReleaseOften on the front page.

Before this, I would spend years working on something in silence, only to have it fall over on top of me and end with me never wanting to touch it again. For almost 2 years, I was working on a Zope replacement in Perl called Iaido before I finally created a ?SourceForge project for it and invited some people in to play. By then, I was already disgusted with my ugly code, wanted to scrap it and restart, but wasn't nearly enthusiastic enough to do that. And by then, there was just too much code - and yet too little documentation - for anyone I invited in to really dive in and muck about.

And this project was to be the core of a community site for coders, web designers, and general all around mad scientists. It would be named ?NinjaCode, at http://www.ninjacode.com. Well, you can see, the community never got off the ground, and I don't even have a hold on the domain anymore. It coulda been a contenda.

But you can see now, on my Projects page, that I've been gradually working up and spinning out little hacks and widgets. Eventually, they combine into bigger widgets, like MTXmlRpcFilterPlugin. I'm thinking that this is the way to go. And, even if/when I do get a grandiose idea, I need to start off releasing the widgets early and show the build up process here in this weblog. Then, there's some documentation from the start and maybe even some enthusiastic co-conspirators from the start.

shortname=ooobeh

Archived Comments

  • Mark Paschal
    That's what happened to my Jabber client: I took too long doing it and lost interest, if only because I kept changing what I was doing.
  • Edward Vielmetti
    Ideas may be useless, but you don't have to build entire cathedrals of code to make a point; some times an aptly named mudball in the right direction does the trick.