Alan’s (Old) Blogometer

Get the software done already!

Is utterly demoralizing. It makes every second a second spent failing. It is absolutely not the attitude to take on any software project, least of all a volunteer effort. I’m posting this here to get it out of my head, and into my blog, so I can forget about it, and keep working.

Reading specifications, organizing information, waiting for ideas to gel, are things that ultimately produce more software in less time, for me at least. I’ve often tried to simply push myself to code completion, and found that it’s a date that never arrives.

I’m also posting this to remind anyone involved in Think New Orleans that it is a volunteer effort with a long future. There is always room for more community building. New Orleans is my community, and I want to build it. It was where I came from. Where I was headed next. It’s where I left all my stuff, because I didn’t think I’d be gone that long.

This isn’t an NGO. It’s how I’m dealing with the loss. The Wiki was never supposed to be an emergency resource, it was supposed to be a place to gather information, so people could reconnect after they took care of the essentials. (The Wiki didn’t scale at all, I couldn’t keep any sort of control over the content, or replicate my experiences with it.)

It was what I could do in a pinch, and it took advantage of my software skills, and my small Mid-City social network, geographic knowledge.

I have a feel for the software people in New Orleans need right now. I could be wrong, but it’s worth a shot. What I’m knocking out now ought to be useful to at least a handful of people, which is about all my server can handle anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Software, Programming, New Orleans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.