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 Or, rather, the codebase has not been touched in a while, not to talk about the Assembla repository which has been outdated for about a month now.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.