At last I’m making good progress with courseway. I’m thinking it might even be time to set a deadline… end of July – first cut on internet, although I reserve the right to change that! Also, I’m going to start posting more to this blog with the techy things I’ve been learning. Before this app I had no official web knowledge, and no ruby or rails knowledge. Hopefully I’ll be able to help you if you’re in the same boat too. Hasta luego…
Archive for the ‘courseway’ category
Good progress
May 14th, 2007Why the Courseway?
March 24th, 2007Courseway is under way at last. Still no public site, you’ll have to be patient for that. I’ve got the paper designs well under way and the rails project started. Some html mockups next. How exciting.
Why am I writing this system?
According to the people who like to inform us on how to write web apps, my best chance at success is to create something to ‘scratch an itch’. ie Write an app that I need. Unfortunately, being an IT bloke, that covers pretty much all the apps that are currently written and popular. It makes sense – programmers are the ones who can write apps, so they’ve gone and scratched all the itches they have already. Project management systems, bug tracking systems, contact systems, life organisation systems etc. So, I’m going to break the first rule and write an app for other people! Shock horror.
More generally, why am I writing a web app?
This is the main question. The name of this new venture is tidyapps. I called it that because I’ve been writing systems for clients for about 10 years now, some of the systems started out as being well thought out, cleanly designed systems, but then over the years, due to never ending requests, they’ve become messy bloated things. It’s pretty much an unavoidable side effect of bespoke application development. I don’t know how to avoid it.
So, this is why I want to write my own apps – to avoid client requests. That way I’ll be able to keep my apps tidy, and as a result hopefully make my life less stressful! Also, but maybe I’m taking this too far now, I’ll be able to make the lives of my users less stressful too by providing them with tidyapps!
This is ridiculous!
March 20th, 2007OK – So it’s been a long time since I’ve posted to this blog. I’ve been too busy with Arnaud, with work, with life in Cusco. It feels like there’s no time left for personal stuff! It’s become a big frustration. Even GTD didn’t help (not that I properly put it to the test). I found GTD a bit useless when all I do all working day is complete programming tasks for the small number of projects I work on and then log the time spent on it. No time for bigger personal aspirations to be broken down or actioned, and my everyday life is simple enough to not have to listify menial tasks. So, what am I doing wrong? Why can’t I Get Real?
I’ve got some time off work coming up. This is my chance to get an app off the ground. Time to knuckle down. Keep it simple. Perfectionism later. Design first. Get it running ASAP. These (amongst other things) are to be my mantras.
I’ve got a lot of software/webapp ideas buried away and have been considering two. In a last minute switch, I’ve now made up my mind… and the winner is… (edited out old site to re-link to iteration 3 which has become bookwhen.com!) You’ll find nothing there right now, but if you’re reading this in 3 months then chances are it’s a lot more exciting. If only I could see into to the future! Any guesses on what it’ll do?
If you stumble upon this site then feel free to sign up and see the exciting progress. Comments welcome…
