Loading ...Just a quick note to let you know I recently published a post on http://ThinkRefresh.com, a Ruby on Rails blog & screencast/tutorial site with an eye on Web business & startups.
ThinkRefresh was founded by Ryan Townsend, a veteran Ruby on Rails coder and Internet Computing undergraduate at The University of Manchester. Ryan and I met on a Rails community site and have been collaborating on projects since then (most notably, he helped me learn the ropes for Rspec, the Ruby-based test suite framework that should prevent bugs from creeping in to http://SoIndustry.com). We also have a Web application project in the works over at http://Notipal.com. It’s a service that will help with Web service downtime and outages, i.e. if SoIndustry was to Fail Whale, Notipal would help in more ways than one (and we’ll detail them all, soon enough). My commitments to SoIndustry, and Ryan’s University work & outside programming employment, mean Notipal isn’t going quite as quickly as we would both like - but it’s definitely getting there.
The article, “Personal Projects: Keep Them Simple”, briefly looks at how you can choose an appropriate idea for a personal project (or start-up) with a goal of keeping your idea very simple & focused - which, I believe, significantly increases your chances of success. Complexity and a lack of consistent vision can easily cause projects to flounder, and that’s something we all want to avoid.
Aside from the fact that simple ideas sound great to other people, there’s a second, albeit no less important benefit for building an application which solves a problem – it’s much easier to say ‘no’ to anything but the core feature set required to solve the problem you’ve diagnosed. This point is particularly topical for ThinkRefresh readers; along with naming things and cache invalidation, feature creep is a programmers worst enemy…
