Go Live Now, Not Later

"It's a problem of motivation..."

Overcoming your own inertia is difficult. The key is to find the personal tipping point at which the rewards for continuing to work on a project outweigh the effort. Personally, that point is once the project is live. The rush from knowing someone else might be using an application I wrote keeps me motivated.

The basic process I follow when building an application alone is as follows:
• Idea
• Feature list
• Leverage existing sources
• Isolate bare minimum features to go live
• Setup SVN
• Build bare minimum features
• Setup production environment and deploy
• Revisit feature list and repeat

For this particular project the initial feature list was:
• Entry detail page
• Entry list page
• Tags
• Categories
• Comments
• Layout
• Color scheme

Developing all of that in one sitting without hitting a snag or getting interrupted is unlikely. Reducing the above list to the bare minimum features yields the following list:

• Entry detail page
• Entry list page
• Layout
• Color scheme

By limiting my feature list I was able to build functioning app in just over an hour. Don't believe me? Here is the breakdown:

• Create new SVN: 1min
• create new Django project: 2min
• Update SVN: 5min
• Create blog app & update SVN: 1min
• Create Entry model: 10min
• Create admin for Entry model: 20min
• Create view for Entry model: 10min
• Create template for Entry model: 5min
• Create view for Entry model list: 5min
• Create template for Entry model list: 5min

Now, all that is left is to skin it and deploy. Over the next few posts I’ll give a bit more information on each of those steps and how they were accomplished for this app.