What I learned from making things

Editor's Notes

• #2: These are just a few of my personal projects I have worked on with Simon and by myself in the past few years, looking at just the sites and applications here you can learn an enormous amount from working on things that you want to work on in your spare time, it helps to develop your skills Simon and I have so many projects in the works now that we have a saying 'that's just what we need. we were looking for another personal project" my talk is called learning from making things
• #3: Setting aside time to work on a project is really important I like to write it in my diary that I am going to be working on wildlifenearyou tonight, sparkabout tommorow and do a blitz of liquid fold at the weekend you need to set yourself deadlines too otherwise you won't see it as a real task just something to do when you are board. http://www.flickr.com/photos/21046489@N06/3387189144/
• #4: So personal projects are all about learning but if you want to do things fast and you have the option to, then stick to what you know Sparkabout is a travel site Simon and I are working on, I tried to build it twice as my first django project but I ended up reengineering and over-engineering it so much, particularly the data models when Simon and i worked on it together then we got the django end mostly there in a weekend, it wasnt beautifully optimised but that wasn't the point
• #5: This is liquid fold a stats app for aggregating the viewport size of your users we built it on google app-engine because we were worried about scalability but it turns out the one thing that google cant do is count apengine doesnt do counters that scale, which is kinda important for a stats package so we never really launched it
• #6: it is a good idea to spin parts of your project into reusable components and open source them it will be useful for you in later projects as well as encouraging you to write reusable modular code now and if you are really lucky someone will improve it foe you because you open sourced it
• #7: The most important question you can ask at the start of a project is where does the data come from data doesn't just grow on trees its no goof saying you will just add the data later because the data is the core of your site or application and as such your data is coming from users you need to put a lot of effort into making it easy fun and worthwhile Wildlifenearyou has a whole bunch of code that will never see the light of day because we hadn't decided where the data was coming from before we built the feature, for example exercises for kids to do at zoos
• #8: When you launch an interactive site it is essential to have an insight as to what people are actually doing with it activity feeds are simple to implement and a great way of doing this. you can also tail your log files if you are that way inclined your activity feed doesn't have to look good its really only for you to look at. For example our feed for wildlife near you shows when anyone uploads a photo, suggests a species or creates a trip
• #9: one of the things with a personal project is you now have a responsibility, its like a pet if you are taking user accounts you need to look after your users probably long after you have lost interest in the project a good example of this is djangopeople desperately needs a delete your account function. it seams counter intuitive but the people who want it REALLY want it. we get about three requests a month and have to do it manually
• #10: you have to consider is the hype caused by scarcity and demand really worth it? you are putting a barrier in front of people who genuinely want to use your site people wont crash the site, scaling is not impossible now because hardware is cheap hardware is cheep, if we had done walrss now rather than then it would have been a different story invitation codes take a lot of development and UX to be done right and done wrong can be terrible
• #11: It is very easy to go down rabbit holes of over complication this is the opening hours entry form for a place on wildlife near you we spent hours arguing over the data model on the fort, where in hindsight a simple textarea may have been better remember you can release a rubbish feature and people will use it, you can learn from that and improve it later
• #12: we soft launched the site to friends about the same time simons talk from django con was released also to note some of the first requests you get will be a german language version we have had about 3 of these requests already and we have only been live a week,
• #13: When we launched djangopeople it initially didn't have openid or microformats and Simon and I got quite a bit of stick for that. I was worried the same thing would happen with wildlifenearyou On the fort I had crippling RSI and had to conduct three people with little experience of front-end. Consequently ever since then I have been working with legacy code but thankfully no-one cared.
• #14: It's really hard not to correct behaviour. Particularly if it is your own parents. Parents make a great test case so instead try to find out what they were intending to do and why they did it this way. Here my mum has labelled the species in this photo as a Simon and a 'don't pick up the penguin sign' which while amusing isn't really the intended use.
• #15: Play is good, its a sign of success when people are having fun with your site. Except if they are intentionally trying to be disruptive and adding frozen chickens to your wildlife spotting site. Here this user has added New York wherehe saw a cockroach and a madagascan hissing cockroach and a rat.
• #16: Your users should have the smallest possible barrier to entry for getting in touch with you, This will make it more likely they'l use it and you wont have to guess if they like it or not. The user only sees a box and a button if they are logged in because it is integrated into our site. we also store their username, email, ip, user agent and what page they are on. dont worry about spam because it is ajax people won't worry about sending you feedback midway through a form submission. in the database we also have notes and status for us
• #17: You'll need to watch the data people enter into your site, if you are getting bad data it is a symptom of a problem with your design somewhere. on django people, users didnt know they could move the map, we found this out because people said they lived in the sea. on wildlifenearyou and innaccurate data points and duplicates, because our add trip and add place workflow needs work.
• #18: Shortly after we launched Simon and I discovered a similar site with more funding, while we were initially concerned we then realised they didnt have our same sense of fun and wasnt the same niche. competition makes you reassess your goals and strengths and focus on what's important http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkingham/3661515844/
• #19: have a proper local dev environment and automated deployment scripts that you are not scared of you will be more likely to make small incremental improvements, which is very important for a project you dont spend much time on also it keeps the site looking fresh and worked on we have a twitter account and blog to tell our users we are doing small changes and these then appear on the homepage of the site
• #20: its your project, you will need to balance whats needed with what is fun to make owls near you is a good example of a small achievable thing that was fun to make we have also learned not to work on someone elses baby you are doing it for fun for free so you need to be personally invested in the project
• #21: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #22: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #23: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #24: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #25: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #26: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #27: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #28: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #29: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #30: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #31: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #32: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #33: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #34: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward
• #35: The most important thing you can do is to get things live no matter what state it's in its better to launch something non perfect than have a logarithmic arc of perfection you will feel so much different once its live & people are using it feelings of guilt resentment and shame will be replaced by pride ownership and responsibility most of all though knowing you made a thing is its own reward