After hitting a small roadblock on FanConcert, I figured now was a good time to sit back and (1) take a short break, since I've been working 8-12 hours every day since the beginning of August, (2) take a step back and look at the big picture for a little while (3) catch up on the Rails community.

Concerning (1): the break was good. I stopped drinking caffiene at the same time and realised that I was actually in more sleep debt that I thought (hint: not good). A few days off the juice was needed -- and after about 48 hours of headache I was all good.

Concerning (2): it's a real testament to the agile iterative process that FanConcert is what it is. It's a block of clay, slowly taking shape. Sure it still doesn't do very much and it doesn't look very nice but it's been LIVE since week 0 and people have been using and commenting on it ever since.

The not-so-obvious downside of the "live iterative strategy" is that people aren't used to using incomplete anything, let alone websites. I've been spending a lot of time explaining why the finer details of the site aren't a priority and especially why the site doesn't look pretty.

I don't blame people for this, it's just a natural response: people are used to using polished websites. But I've learned a lesson: I now expect that kind of feedback and I write it down so I can use it when the time comes to use it. It's when a certain fine detail becomes a distraction from more important feedback that I realised I had to handle it to a certain extent.

When the site was just links and a white background, most people's first comment was that it lacked colour. I thought it was a pretty minor detail, but after getting that feedback a dozen times and nothing much else, I realised I needed to remove that distraction: I added a bit of colour to the background, and now people are giving better initial feedback because they aren't distracted by the lack of colour. These distractions are easy cop-out feedback, so I felt it was good to get that one out of the way, and it didn't take much effort.

Concerning (3): Rails is a moving platform, it hasn't even hit 1.0 yet. Version 1.0 is a symbolic milestone, I know, but some developers still take it seriously, like I believe the Rails people will. Rather than update to 0.14.x, I'm going to wait until 1.0 plus a few maintenance releases. I don't have the resources to keep up with every single point release and I'm not using any crazy code, so the post 1.0 upgrade should be relatively painless. Besides, I've read that the Rails team is concentrating more on backwards-compatibility and careful deprecation, which makes upgrades nicer.

Other than not upgrading, I'm also missing out on what's going on in the Rails community while working so hard on FanConcert. I don't think it's a good idea to be out of touch with the community for so long. Not just for the new stuff but also for time-saving tips and APIs and methods I may not know of yet that could help me. I'm still learning Rails, so I should be "taking advantage" of the great Rails community more often. It really is a fantastic support network.

I'm going to take my head out of the sand for a little while while I'm doing the "big picture" things, see what's going on and then get back to work again.

Anyway, that's my little retrospective. Nothing specific to FanConcert there though, it was mostly process details ... probably some feature stuff in a future blog post.