People study you.

 

A couple weeks ago I was interviewed by Mike Taber of The Micropreneur Academy. The focus of the interview was on The Journal, but Mike had done his homework and so we talked about Samu Games, as well.

 

So now I’m a case study in longevity, or “How To Not Give Up”.

 

I think I sound a bit … odd (and I seem to be talking fast). But I guess that’s normal. I’ve never interviewed myself.

 

The interview isn’t publicly available. You have to be a member of Micropreneur Academy…and they aren’t accepting new members right now. So…if you’re already a member there: Enjoy! It’s Case Study #16. If not…I guess…wait? It’ll probably still be there.

 

-David

 

 

Drawing from my own 2009 experiences, of course.

 

Even automation that takes longer than it should to be implemented is a Good Thing. I spent a full week automating a process that, at the time, took me an entire 3-4 minutes a week to do “manually”. I felt pretty silly. Now, though, with the “sunk cost” firmly in the past, I’m happy as I can be that I no longer have to do that task each week. And I’m making plans to extend the automation to other, related tasks.

 

Never build what you can buy. I’ve followed this mantra for years. Still relying on it. I spent the most ever for an update of The Journal in third-party components and libraries. I even bought a whole new development PC specifically for The Journal 5/Project Vee. I earned it all back in the first couple weeks of the new release, just in upgrade fees. Because the total amount spent wasn’t that much, really (just under $4000). The biggest expenditure was My Own Time, spent lavishly over a 2 year period. I’ve gotten some of that time back already, though, with an eye to reclaiming more of it next year.

 

Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. If there’s been some significant inflation (for example, like we saw in 2008) since the last time you set your price, you need to put some thought into how much you might be undercharging. Then fix it. I’ve been going to the same stylist for my monthly haircut since 2000. She loves me (and my family). Not the least because I’ve given her permission 3 times now to raise her prices (in 2002, 2006, and now in 2010), and held her hand through the process. In all 3 cases it was obvious that her prices had fallen behind reality. Ironically enough, in that same stretch of time, I had only changed the price of The Journal once (in 2001). I hadn’t had a complaint about the price of The Journal in years. Which is never a good sign. Between November 2001 and August 2009 I calculated there had been about 22% inflation. I was way behind the curve. That’s fixed now.

 

Ship, damn it! Some products will never be “done”. You have to learn to recognize when you’re “done enough”, and ship already. Attaining perfection is a great goal, but it’s impossible to schedule–and hard on the revenue stream.

 

That’s about it, I think.

 

Happy New Year!

 

-David

 

 

Granted, I expected it to evaporate a *little*, since I was participating in NaNoWriMo again, and because we were hosting Thanksgiving this year (complete with in-laws staying for a week or so), and because I was working on The Journal 5.1. But it evaporated a *lot*.

 

NaNo didn’t go so well (though I did have some success), but the other parts went OK (I’m suspecting that I got as much work in on TJ5.1 as I did because I was avoiding NaNo, but that’s a different topic).

 

Still … *evaporated*. November started, then ended, in quick succession.

 

Now it’s December (already), and I have to wrap up 2009 and plan for 2010.

 

Planning for 2009 was pretty simple: Finish The Journal 5. In fact, I think that single-minded focus through most of the year is a big part of why November evaporated. I got stuck “betwixt and between” a completed (major) goal and the end of the year, unsure what I was supposed to *now*. The Journal 5.1 came out of that existential spinning-of-the-wheels since it was easy to keep doing what I had been doing. Certainly easier than thinking up and writing a batch of new stories (I got 9 done, plus I [finally] wrote the [long overdue] ending of a novel). So wrapping up 2009 should be pretty simple, as well.

 

Planning for 2010 will require a bit more thought. Can’t have it evaporating too.

 

-David

 

I launched Project Vee/The Journal 5 in September 2007. This was to be the first major version upgrade of The Journal since The Journal 4 was released in November 2004.

 

Unlike some past major version upgrades, The Journal 5 wouldn’t be a ground-up re-design or re-write. Tthere would be a lot of changes to core components, of course. And while I would retain the main features of The Journal that had accumulated in 11 years (at the time), I would be (in some cases finally) adding some new features and functionality that I considered crucial to the future. For example, thorough Unicode support, a new client-server-capable database, stuff like that. What I consider strategic features. Plus, I had my eye on some cool new functionality to make The Journal even easier to use.

 

I think I achieved most of that.

 

Back when I started, I expected to release The Journal 5 in 2008. That’s not what happened.

 

 

 

The Journal 5 on its release included most of the strategic features I had planned:

 

Of course, there were some grand plans that didn’t make it. Full localization support, for example. I laid a good foundation for it, but I decided to push localizing the user interface off until after the initial release. The software was in too much flux, even through testing, to try to translate it as I was developing it. However, I’ve just now begun to take advantage of what I did, and I look forward to having the user interface fully localized for a number of languages in the next few months.

 

 

Even if I have to say so myself, I took a working, full-featured application, and I made it even better. Significantly better. I even drastically changed how the software looks. And yet, somehow, it still *feels* like The Journal.

 

I credit that to my development process. I started with low-level pieces, improved them (sometimes totally redesigned them), and then spent (a lot of) time making the new code support the old functionality that the rest of the code still expected. By focusing on one sub-system at a time, I kept The Journal largely intact throughout the process, always building it back to what it had been.

 

 

I may have taken a lot longer than I expected (as I’ll discuss in more detail shortly), but at least I got it out the door.

 

 

 

Only about 18 man-months of full-time development, I figure, but still, from the beginning of September 2007 to the end of August 2009 is, yes, 2 years.

 

And there I was, at the beginning, naively expecting to be done in 2008. In testing by summer 2008 at the latest.

 

What happened?

 

I think I fell prey to one of the classic blunders. The most popular of which is: “Never get into a land war in Asia.” But only slightly less well known is: “Never accept project completion estimates from a programmer when nothing is on the line.”

 

There was no hard deadline. And, really, no hard new feature list.

 

I went into the project with rather open-ended goals, and I got rather open-ended development.

 

Should’ve seen that coming.

 

 

I was too haphazard in my approach to user testing.

 

Next time:

 

 

I think the main reason The Journal 5 took so long to develop and release is that I’m just one guy.

 

I do as much as I can to “outsource” as much as I can. I’ve purchased libraries and tools from all over the world (Russia, Germany, Panama and more; even the USA sometimes) because there’s no way I could personally design and build everything I need for even such a narrowly defined niche product like The Journal.

 

Just to mention it, though, when I did a full build of that narrowly defined niche product yesterday, it compiled over 999,000 lines of code. And that’s only the fraction of the whole, the libraries and components that I have the source code for (including the quarter-million or more lines of code that I wrote myself). Further, that’s just the program itself, and doesn’t consider all the other services I use to put The Journal together and offer it for sale, like the Web page, payment processing, CD fulfillment, help file creation, customer support, and so on.

 

There is a limit to what one person can achieve, even someone who leverages third parties and automation as much as he can. I wonder sometimes if I’m not beginning to get close to that limit.

 

On the other hand, I still see a lot of potential. I’m not stretched too thin yet.

 

 

Even though I’m writing this port-mortem of The Journal 5, that doesn’t mean I’m finished with The Journal 5. Like I mentioned before, I’m working to localize it now. After that, I have some ideas for new features that I want to pursue.

 

I continued to update The Journal 4 from its initial release in November 2004 through February 2008. I expect a similar run with The Journal 5.

 

One of my goals for The Journal 5 was to create a new foundation to build on. I think I achieved that. I’m looking forward to seeing what develops in the future.

 

-David

I’ve been looking into localization-support components/libraries lately, looking to (finally) provide other languages for The Journal’s UI (I’ve offered many different spell checker dictionaries almost since the beginning, but the UI has remained firmly monolingual).

 

I guess I should’ve guessed that most such software would not be built in either the USA or England.

 

Especially not in the USA.

 

-David

You have to be providing decent customer service in order to have a customer tell you directly how much they think your customer service sucks.

 

-David

…and I answer it.

 

Three (or more) different people ask me the same question, though, and I go looking for something that obviously needs fixing.

 

-David

Friends and family, growing fatigued of my single-minded focus on The Journal 5 over the past months, looked forward to the actual release of the software last week.

 

“Then you can relax again,” they said. “Maybe take some pictures or write something again.”

 

I gave up trying to explain that releasing software doesn’t let you relax. Far from it.

 

No, a new release takes all the pressure and anxiety of the development process and condenses it into one really long, hard week. At least.

 

In addition to the fairly standard, stress-inducing, ulcer-causing questions of “Did I do enough testing?”, “Did I miss a bug that’s going to eat people’s Windows?”, and “Are the existing users going to hate it?” (not to mention “Will new users hate it–and stop purchasing?”; that’s a rough one), there’s a near total upheaval in customer support processes.

 

Customers, both old and new, are asking new and different questions–questions I don’t have copy-and-paste templates prepared for. Existing customers want to know where you moved their favorite feature to–and why you chose those awful, irritating new icons.

 

And they’re all asking these questions at the same time.

 

So…yeah…relax.

 

I’ll put it on my to-list. Is next week OK? I’ll pencil it in…

 

-David

The Journal 5 (The Project formerly known as Vee) is now available.

 

 

My plan for The Journal 5, which began development in September 2007, could be summed up as “The Journal Even Better”. I wanted to improve all the major parts of The Journal–the database, the internal data structures, the user interface–and provide more support for international users. Plus I wanted to offer additional category and entry options, more reports and other tools, and, finally, to offer a selection of “skins” for the user interface.

 

I think I achieved most of that–even if it took a bit longer than I expected (18 man months; didn’t see that coming).

 

In short, The Journal 5 is an inside-out redesign of The Journal, preserving all the great journaling and writing features that have accumulated over the years and adding some cool new features and capabilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll be writing a post mortem of Project Vee/The Journal 5 in the near future.

 

-David

More on this tomorrow.

 

-David