monkey!

November 20, 2007

I got an idea! Sweet, let’s get coding right away!

This past week, I had an idea for a new project. I wrote it down, shared it with a few people, made sure the idea wasn’t already taken, and got to business

Of course, if I were my un-educated, un-experienced 17 year old self, I would have been laying out design and coding things about 3 days ago, but I haven’t opened a single programming IDE, or drawn out any layouts … yet

What I did, was use a very valuable tool (especially if you’re working with more then one person), that tool is Google Docs. I wrote down my thoughts: What the main idea of the project would be, what features will make it stand out, our demographic, contributors, etc. After I completed this, I used the amazing Google Docs Collaboration tool and added my friend Corey as a collaborator to the document.

With Corey as an editor now, he was able to add his own comments to the document - on the fly. He didn’t even have to let me know that he made changes, I could check in 5 minutes and see what he did without touching a button. Despite having access to MSN for conversation, we went back and forth within the document, writing our comments down in different fonts. Eventually, we had a big mish-mash of ideas!

After sleeping on the ideas, I woke up the next morning and wrote, in the same document a 2-page business plan of everything from what the project will do to what I’m looking to get out of it.

We now have our plan, and we can begin work. A few days ago, I began slowly modeling out the classes and structure of the project. It’s amazing how easy coding will be when I already have everything laid out for me. I will now know that Object X has many Object Y’s and when I’m ready for programming, I can easily create my models to affect this and structure my database to promote these ideas.

With the models slowly being built, I will be ready to bust out Komodo and begin programming soon!

Project development is exciting, especially when you have an idea that you think has big potential, but you can’t rush into things. Take things slow, write it all down, plan out scenarios, sleep on things you’re uncertain about, and don’t rush into it. I know when I finish my project, that I will be happy with the infrastructure behind it because I spent the time to make sure it would be scalable and viable for my project.

P.S - No, I won’t reveal my project, not yet. It’s too early and I don’t like talking about something I’m uncertain of. Hopefully in a month or two I can write more revealing details and document my creation of this, as it looks like it will be very, very fun!