StockWiki Web Development Diary 3/15/2007
I feel down today thinking about the Design-Prototype release of StockWiki. My part of the development will be ready for release between the end of March and 1st week of April. It seems so small and puny compared to the months of effort that went into it. Concepts that had seemed so wonderful and creative at the time of their first birth seem obvious and common to me now. I hope our test reviewers -- who will be seeing them for the first time -- will be more impressed. I fear my months of effort will sputter out like a damp firecracker whose light fades into nothingness in the night, never having seen the glory of its bloom. I suppose other developers experience the same dispair at some point. I must remind myself that I cannot control the public's reception of our site: I can only control my own efforts towards its development.
Bill is speaking at a conference in San Jose during the last week of March. Immediately before, we are attending StartUp School here at Stanford, and immediately after, we are going on a 3-day ski-trip with his work group. So we lose 1 week of development time, and my part of the release may be delayed by 1 week (or maybe not). I had hoped that Bill will be able to contribute his part to the release, but he will not be able to do any development work on StockWiki until the middle of April, at the earliest. By then, I will be looking for a full-time programmer. Our current thinking is that we would need a full-time programmer with Flex 2 and ActionScript3 experience. We may also need a Ruby on Rails programmer, but that has become our secondary concern.
Ahhhh, and so, I plug away. I place one tiny step in front of another, and try not to look up at the vast horizon ahead.
---------------- Correction ----------------------------------------
{I was using a wrong definition of Alpha-Stage development. According to Wikipedia, the Alpha-Stage includes a substantial proof of concept with working code for main features. Since the spreadsheet feature will not be implemented in code until Bill has some time, we will not be in Alpha-Stage until much later. I am responsible for coming up with ideas for the main features and how it will look when it is operating as well as generating sample content. Bill said this stage is "storyboarding," but I like "design-prototytpe" better. I am not sure if we are at the "Pre-Alpha" stage yet, which is a prototype stage where major features are still being determined.}
