Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

I was inspired this week by a post on the Rails Google Group by Melvin at 48hourlaunch.wordpress.com, who was asking for suggestions on a software problem to tackle with 48 hours of effort.

I’ve got what I call a “magic notebook”– several, to be precise– full of app ideas in various stages of ideation. So I decided to take on this challenge as well and see what I can do with one of them.

Like Mel, I’m taking on a project that meets one of my immediate needs and is well within my area of expertise. So I’ll be creating something that is useful to me and also has a broader market appeal.

One of my defining characteristics is the inability to do things halfway; unfortunately, this can sometimes manifest as “analysis paralysis”, overengineering, etc. Although Rails inherently short-circuits a lot of these tendencies (as does my business partner, for that matter!) the strict time limit I’m putting on myself makes this something of a competition between completion and perfection. At worst, I will move one of my unrealized applications one step closer to market, and hopefully learn something about my internal process along the way.

So what’s the big project going to be? Can’t talk about that yet, but if all goes according to plan there should be something public in within the next 30 days (48 hours / 2 hours per day = 24 days). I’ll also be posting notes about my progress as I go.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under General Tech & Development, Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.