We haven’t quite opened the floodgates on the Hugster beta yet. However, we’re still accepting people to sign up to be notified when we do. Anyone that has signed up is already first in line, of course. Looks like this will start happening for real early next week.
Many teams I’ve worked on in the past end up slipping their dates because they want to get that one last feature in … it’s quite the opposite over here. We’re busy taking features away, trying to whittle the site down to its essense.
43 Things/ Twinkler is teaching us a lot about the power of simplicity (not that we weren’t already eager students at this school). Strangely, our first prototype (Snuzzle) was the most feature-packed and the most lines of code. Twinkler is only 450 lines of code. Hugster will be one half the Snuzzle site as far as functionality is concerned (I’ll go into a list of features that have been temporarily pulled a bit later). I almost need three hands in order to count the number of fully-implemented features we’ve cut. It’s a joyous feeling. My only hope is that it’ll be 1/4th the site it once was by the time you see it … and that that 1/4th is the best 1/4th we can give you.
remind’s me of DHH’s line that “instead of building a half-assed product, build half the product”
And if you can get away with building 1/4, it’s even better
I’m glad to see that our endless tirading for less software and saying no by default is turning into a “joyous feeling”.
I think that is one of the hardest things to learn and accept when building anything, you can’t always have everything you want, because then it will just be delayed or even worse suck big time.
450 lines? Is that including unit/functional tests and fixtures? I’ve found when building web apps with rails almost all of my code goes in to the tests.
Here’s an interesting counterpoint from Joel on Softare:<br />
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Rabble… that doesn’t include unit tests, or things like html and CSS… just controller and model code.