leaps and bounds

I keep talking about (more like won't stfu about), the sideproject I've been working on. Today I added several draft pages to this blog containing documentation and release information, I'm expecting to have the actual rollout sometime next week. I've made a flowchart to show you how my mental process worked so far on this project, and where I'm at now.

[caption id="attachment_131" align="aligncenter" width="331" caption="how my brain works"][/caption]

Most of the time I get stopped in the "will it ever be any good?" decision, it returns no, and I scrap my code, and wait to have a worthwhile idea. This time though, somehow, I've managed to move past that one, and for the last 2 weeks or so have been spinning around the "is it any good?" -> "no" -> "refactor" -> "is it any good?" -> ... loop. I've been tweaking this or that and in my head there was still so much to do before releasing.

Today though I've found myself writing up release information and documentation, and I came to realize that the ever present list of things to add or get working or refactor had been brought down to nil. I'm out of code work to do for the time being on this project, the best thing I can do is release. There seems to be this huge leap though from hacking to releasing, for me at least. I can sit all day adding features and refining APIs, but I realize now how frightening it is to put your work into the wild and try to promote it.

I feel this anxiety doubly compounded because I didn't write an application where the code, even if open sourced, is neatly tucked away behind the scenes. I wrote a library, with an interface and code that if it gets any kind of adoption, people will probably look at, curse at, laugh at. Really though, there is nothing to do but put it out there, track the bugs, iterate, and make it something I can be proud of.

Next week I will be officially releasing this side project, my hope is Monday morning. I want to write up some great documentation, explanation, set up bug and feature tracking, set up a forum, and move the project over to github, because github is the official hotness. So this is a head's up, watch out next week because big things are coming.