Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2002-8-26

Just build it

(Found via Workbench) Andre Torrez points out some important truths about software development.

People spend a lot of time messing around talking about what they want to code, and how they're going to do it. What they forget is that the most important thing that decides whether a project will succeed or not is motivation. If you come up with a good idea, the best time to build it is now. If you talk about it for a week, that's a week worth of motivation you just wasted talking rather than coding.

The most popular and the second most popular things I've done were both hacked together in less than a day, when I was in that highly motivated mood after just discovering a New Thing.

Andre: "Stop talking about it and just build it."

So, without further adieu, here's a pointer to an early public beta of the code that runs this weblog. Obviously enough, it will let you post a blog onto a Radio Community Server (e.g. blogs.salon.com, and it's configured to use my Python Community Server by default. It was hacked up in a couple of days, when I was motivated by wanting to get the first public blog on blogs.salon.com and (for some quickly forgotten reason) didn't want to do it with Radio.

Note: if you're not a unix hacker, don't bother with it; it's not an end-user product, rather a command-line app for quick blogging from Linux. Anyone interested in putting a front-end on it please get in touch. Currently it's not open source, but if people are interested in working on it with me, that can change.
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