Coma, Books, Financial Freedom and stuff

I haven't got anything done for LightFrame in a while. Or, rather, the codebase has not been touched in a while, not to talk about the Assembla repository which has been outdated for about a month now. But I haven't neglected it entirely. I have done some ticket-management and updated the wiki. And then there's all kind of planning going when my brains go to idle-mode.

And then there's this damn book I've been reading - Joel on Software by the same Joel Spolsky I mentioned in my previous post, which just seems to suck in all the free time I have. The book is a collection of essays from his blog, which are great in their own right, but when collected in to a hand-held physical book, the information value is even greater than the sum of the parts.

The book is mostly about how not to create software, with a corporate angle. It might sound like a boring business manual for MBA's, which it absolutely is not. Anyhow, even though I have decided not to start a company for LightFrame (thanks to Ville for giving some precious insight about this!), I do feel that the book might help the project. Although I probably never will make any money out of LightFrame, I still want it to be successful and get adopted as widely as possible. It does have well-established competitive products that it has to better, and I would like nothing better to eventually have LightFrame as the PHP web framework (although I would be just as ecstatic to have LF recognized along with the other big boys).

Not having any money involved is probably one of the most liberating things possible - even if nobody would ever hear of LightFrame, I have not lost anything. I can't even say that I have lost my free time, because I would still have done my personal projects for myself, by myself. I might lose my face if I do some humongous mistakes somewhere along the way, but that requires LF to gain an audience first, which is already one of the primary goals. So doing this is not a very bad deal for me at all.

Then the LightFrame status report: As said, LF's code hasn't evolved that much during the past days. That's because I had to get the first real project based on LF done, as the deadline was closing in. I hadn't the time to get everything done properly via LightFrame, so I had to do some old-school PHP solutions at some places. But (once I finish reading the book, which should be any day now) development will once again ensue.

I'm franticly trying to get all the tickets done for the Development Release 1 -milestone, so that I can declare a feature freeze (which is just around the corner) and concentrate on churning the code to completion. Once the milestone is reached, I have some other plans, like taking a pause on coding on LightFrame, and doing some other things I have planned that hopefully benefit LightFrame.

But not this weekend. I'm going to take a weekend off of everything and anything and just have a jolly good time, enjoying the summer. I recommend you doing the same.

Stackoverflow

Now for something completely offtopic:

I just want to give a quick nod to Joel Spolsky (if only I had more time to concentrate on his essays) and Jeff Attwood and their stackoverflow.com 'podcast' (although it's just an mp3-file that is attached to a blog post). Highly recommended listening, by the way. There's worse ways of spending an hour (per episode) of your life.

Having the time (the insomniac that I am) listening through the latest entries, I get warm feelings when Spolsky is surprised that people actually are hired and paid differently at some places according to their degree. I mean, I couldn't agree more when Attwood mentioned that he didn't like college and the "learning how to learn" thing. Seems like both Attwood and Spolsky agree that, while degrees are not useless, what you actually are able to do plays a bigger role in what you are worth, careerwise.

I tip my hat to those words and feel delighted. I strongly recommend following the weekly entries. Also, if you for some strange reason haven't read articles on joelonsoftware.com but have managed to find this blog, you have got things totally backwards. Stop reading mine and start reading his. Now.

LightFrame is still alive and kicking. No worries there.

Ads-Away

In case someone sees the difference, I've got rid of the ads from this blog. They were senseless from the start. I just wanted to check if adsense was a way to get rich without doing anything. Clearly, it wasn't.

Epic Update Fail

I seem to have neglected this blog, which has not been the purpose at all.

The downtime in activity on this blog is just a cause of time prioritizing. As I've started a day job programming stuff, my juices run low at the end of the day. So I squeeze everything I have into actually getting LightFrame some meat around its bones. In other words, the project is alive and pretty well.

To give a rundown of the recent events, I'm still working on the actual website that runs on LightFrame. Things go along a bit sluggishly, as I implement the missing stuff as I go. Currently I'm doing a generic CRUD that I could use as an admin page for the project, and it's coming along surprisingly nicely. The website is nearing completion, so once it is ready and out of my hair, I can concentrate on getting LightFrame towards Developer Release 1.

To see what I'm up to, you should take a look at the Assembla project space. What I'm doing there is posting tickets (todos mostly) and updating them as I make progress. The wiki is also something to take a look at, as I'm dumping my brain there as I see fit. It's not yet complete, and is still desynchronized with the Google Code wiki, which is a shame (and a low-priority, too). The Git repository found at Assembla is updated very rarely. I'll push something once I get something half-decent and working. Most probably after I clean up some code once I get some new features polished and done that have risen from the current web project.

To sum it up, the pace has slowed down a bit, but I'm still allocating everything I've got to LightFrame. It inches forward, and I have every intention to get it in a publishable shape.

I'm confident that once I get Developer Release 1 out, the framework gets its first group of persons I dare call an 'audience'. This leads to feedback, which leads to constructive development, which leads to better quality, which leads to a larger audience and we have a benign cycle on our hands here. But before I start conquering the world, I better start with my own back yard. Actually, I'll start with my bed.