My Trip to Boulder
Today I spent the day at TechStars for “TechStars for a Day”. It was a very overwhelming day and I met a lot of interesting people. I came out of the day with a number of realizations about things that I’ve been doing “wrong”, and improvements that I need to make in my approach.
1. Private Beta == Bad
This notion that I’ve had of letting just the core community members in to test a closed beta of Garden & Vanilla 2 is simply a bad idea. After all, why limit the user-base when I know that *all* of you have fantastic ideas? So, the first beta that goes online will be open to anyone to register and use. I want everyone to get a taste ASAP.
2. Delivering on Promises
I’ve been explaining the softare for literally months without giving any of you any real immediate interaction. I need to pick up the pace and get something out there for you guys to play with SOON. I don’t have a specific date for you, but my hope is that we’re talking about weeks, not months.
3. Listening to You
Obviously I have my ideas of what I would like to see the software do. But ultimately it will be you, the users, who judge the software as something you will want to use – or not. So, after you’ve had a chance to use it, I will be paying a lot of attention to your feedback. What do you like? What don’t you like? What is missing? What have I overlooked? etc.
4. Open the Source
I still believe that it is important to have a real focus on where the software is going. But I think I’ve been confusing that need with “letting go of control”. The way that changes were implemented with Vanilla 1 were far too constricted. I’ve been speaking in private chat with a bunch of the Vanilla 1 developers about this, and while I won’t be allowing *everyone* to commit changes to the core, I will be accepting bugfixes and change suggestions from the community and allowing other Vanilla 1 developers to review and decide on which ones should be a part of the core. Some Vanilla 1 developers are already looking into ways we can facilitate this process, and I’ll be relinquishing a lot of control to them right away.
With all of these things in mind, my primary goal for the software in the immediate future is to get a beta online right away. I’m trusting that everyone is aware that the design isn’t going to be as polished as the final product will be. My focus will be on completing core features and not focusing so much on design. Design can be polished later.
The bottom line comes down to a quote I heard today: Getting all of your ducks in a row is important, but it is more important that you do something with the ducks. That is now the focus.
Mark,
One thing Linus Torvalds remarked after switching to a distributed version control system was that there were far fewer arguments about who got commit access. A DVCS employs a “network of trust”, meaning you only pull commits from your core group of developers. In turn, that core group each pulls from their “network of trust”, and so forth, making a more “open” development workflow much easier. You’ve still got control and final say as the guy tagging the releases, but anyone can clone and commit changes which might eventually make their way up to the core through the distributed model.
Just a thought.
@EvDawg – Yes, git is one of the changes we’re seriously considering.
I think the implementation and use of a good bug tracking solution will help a lot too and allow people like myself to contribute to the codebase, especially in the case of milestones and bugs.
@Adrian – I wholeheartedly agree. I have this tendency to want to build all of that stuff myself. But another thing I took away from today is the necessity to focus on one thing and do that one thing well. There are a lot of other products out there already that solve this problem, and there’s no need for me to reinvent the wheel. What I’d really like is to find a solution that handles bug tracking, bugfixes/suggestions, and core integration of those. With the small bit of interaction I’ve had with various community members about it, it looks like there are a few solutions out there. The Android crew, for example, uses git and another tool (can’t remember the name right now) to work this way. My hope is that we can do the same.
Cool meeting you today (Real Life Gaming Guys). Techstars was exhausting hu!? Look forward to testing out your new forums.
The bug tracker that the Android folks use is called Gerrit.
https://review.source.android.com
@Greg – Absolutely exhausting. I crashed hard last night.
@Jeff – Yes! Thank you. I was totally blanking on the name.
So is it really exciting and interesting to be working with people who have very similar goals? Did you meet any of the mentors or anything really exciting yet?
That sound really great. Can’t wait to see something in action
regarding the repository-stuff:
Did you take a look at Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/)? The Kohana-Guys (http://kohanaphp.com/) seem to be quite excited about it.
Redmine is Ruby on Rails…
I have worked with it a while ago. It isn’t bad, but some parts are a pain in the ass and it can get really slow!
“So is it really exciting and interesting to be working with people who have very similar goals? Did you meet any of the mentors or anything really exciting yet?”
I did meet a few of the mentors, yes. I also met a bunch of other people who are in the running for this year’s program. There were a lot of people with a lot of very interesting, very different ideas they are working on.
@jeff: php frameworks are slower than rails.
PHP is everywhere, it’s safe (memory leaks don’t matter) but it’s slow for big application.
I’ve been following your posts for a while now about Garden, and I’ve been really excited about it. Great to hear that we’ll all get to see a bit of your hard work soon!
Mark, I want to be you when I grow up.
Very much looking forward to Garden. I have a few projects in mind that work best as bolt-ons to a forum, so using a framework that was designed first and foremost to run a forum is a good start for me.
As for Git, I like the idea of it but there’s no Eclipse plugin. *cry*
Oh, well. Go Garden, go!
Thanks, guys!
Mark, all the stuff you’ve been working on recently sounds great! I’m eagerly and patiently awaiting Garden.
More eagerly than patiently though.
Hey Mark
Just wanted to say Hi. I have been messing around with Vanilla after checking out a few others. I really like it and it’s very promising for what I’m trying to do. Without going into details I’d like to use it to mimic a well known Blogger’s site.The difference is I’m not a jerk and the owner of this site is. I’d keep it do follow and add some other things anyway if your up to talk with me on the phone about some CASH and the project look me up on my blog. I’m serious and hope to hear from you. Ultimately vanilla
is easy enough I’d get it done myself eventually but I want some Professional clean code cause I plan on it getting alot of traffic very quickly.
Thanks
Hi Mark,
I like vanilla 1! It’s really great. It’s small sized with a really comfortable AddOn System (upload and activate with one click).
I’m waiting for (beta) release of vanilla 2.
Vanilla 1 is great but I hope (and I feel confident) Vanilla 2 will much improved
Best regards
Guess not that cool
Hey Mark, how close are we to seeing an online beta?
Trevor – There have been some setbacks, but it’s all for the greater good. I’ve now got a number of developers from the Lussumo Community helping me hammer out the remaining issues. Things should start to move faster now. We’re still building the list of bugs and features to complete, so it’s hard to give an exact date until that is finished.
[...] few months ago I posted about how I went down to Boulder, Colorado to attend TechStars for a Day. TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed-stage investment fund. In human terms, it means that they [...]