Re: Draft: My one-on-one technical session with Doug

From: N. C a r r o l l (ncarroll@inreach.com)
Date: Sun Oct 15 2000 - 21:05:59 PDT


Tossing in my two cents....

Grant:
> > ... I am more concerned with a first step,
> > any step, to get started. Even if it's in the wrong direction, it would
> > be forward movement to work from. IMHO that is what open source
> > projects are about. You do what you want and if anyone else wants to
> > fork the code, so be it, have at it. One would hope a synergy develops
> > solidifying your code line as the base. I think this is how Apache and
> > others can work.

Eugene:
> I fall in the middle of these two trains of thought. Doug is concerned
> about moving in the wrong direction; you're more concerned about not
> moving at all. I think that both of these are equivalent evils.
> Successful open source development depends heavily on strong initial
> design. It's certainly feasible, even highly recommended, to scrap
> initial code attempts entirely and rewrite from scratch, but if you start
> off with a bad design to begin with, an open source-style methodology is
> not going to help you in any way whatsoever.

Me:
With Doug, I think a bazaar is best started in the shadow of
a cathedral (though I'm putting it in my own words!). Every
good piece of software starts with a very few good hackers,
no matter how history might revise the story later.

With Grant, I would like forward motion.

Perhaps both can be served similtaneously. We are probably
all interested in pushing the limits of Augment out on the web.
(And some are doubtless more ambitious than that.) Unfortunately,
thinking takes more than hours, it takes days and weeks for
problems to work out in our minds. An architecture might be
written in a week, but not without weeks of mulling it over
first.

But meanwhile, there is a certain amount of grunt work that
needs doing on any project. There's plenty to do, such as:

converting Augment

learning the Augment features and methods

researching the status of related projects

developing a list of tech-savvy media contacts

helping Henry clean up the main bootstrap site

Since there is no project manager or chart, I'm finding the best
returns come on things I can do alone. I gather Grant and Eugene
are of the same thought, since they seem to submerge for awhile
and then surface with a completed task.

Doubtless some of this work will end up in the trash can.
But some won't.

Nicholas

--
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Nicholas Carroll Email: ncarroll@inreach.com Alternate: ncarroll@iname.com ______________________________________________________



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