Setting myself targets
I’ve been doing this part-time thing for over a month now, out of about six months (hopefully). I reckon I need to think more about the decisions to be made at the end of those six months. How will I know, at the end of this trial period, whether I should continue with it full-time, or give it up and go back to normal life?
My wife reckons I shouldn’t worry about such things yet, as I’ve only been at it for just over a month. She thinks I shouldn’t be setting myself targets until about four months in.
Maybe she’s right, but I think I need to know more concretely what to aim at. For example, do I want to have a tool out there and working, so I can gauge developer’s interests? If so, that would affect my time prioritisation between now and then - I’d spend more time developing and less time talking to people to ask them if they’d want to buy tools.
Any thoughts are welcome.
September 28th, 2006 at 8:51 am
I’d definitely suggest you get a working tool together as a priority. Talking to people might be a good way to get them interested in your tools, but no one is going to buy them just on your say so. Show them something working and if they want it, they’ll jump on it. Showing early prototypes (make sure you everyone that they are prototypes) gets you quick feedback, ideas for improvements, lets you know what doesn’t work very well so you don’t waste time on it etc. Plus we can all see what it is… you’re missing a screenshots section :)
Release Early, Release Often and be Agile. /buzzwords
September 28th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
What-ho Day. Thanks for the thoughts.
Release Early, Release Often & Agile - I entirely agree.
I’ve not released anything yet (for reasons I may come to in a bit) but I have been sort-of-practicing those principles internally. I wrote my first prototype in Perl, then recoded it in Java with a bit more functionality, and now an integrating it into the Carbide IDE. Actually, I suppose that’s a different principle - “throwaway prototyping” - but it shares the same acknowledgement that requirements might change, so doing a single big monolithic thing isn’t going to work, you need to do steps on the way there.
Spending time working on coding is all very well, though, but in this game I have to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the rest of the Symbian universe. I need to co-operate with customers and Symbian, as much as I need to be able to sell them stuff. Increasingly, though, I’m getting enough feedback from potential customers to have an idea of which tools might or might not sell, so I’d like to think my time will shift a bit more towards development soon.
The lack of screenshots/information/releases is because there’s a small chance I might want to patent what I’m doing (hideous though software patents are). I doubt I will, but until I’ve made my mind up, I can’t disclose stuff outside of confidential relationships :-(