Execution Alone Isn’t Enough

I used to think of myself as an “idea man”, but I had misconceptions about how ideas play out in the real world. Many years ago someone told me “ideas are a dime a dozen” and explained why. That set my world spinning. After all, I had some really great ideas! Eventually I came to realize that ideas are never great without great execution.

Around Christmas of 1998 I created a web framework similar to Ruby on Rails. I had serious confidence issues though, which meant I never gave my framework the real world testing it needed. Eventually I put my framework into production in a critical situation. Unfortunately that caused problems because of the lack of real world testing early on.

I learned that it’s not enough to execute, you’ve got to have some confidence too or your execution will be weak. It will be as though you never executed at all.

Speaking of things not executed, New Year’s Resolutions stink. Why not have a theme for the year instead? I do. My theme this year is “Increase Capability”. My 30 in 30 project is a direct result of that. I want to increase my software shipping capability.

It may seem egotistical but it’s actually the opposite. I have to set aside my ego and execute with confidence. (That’s hard!) Otherwise it’ll be like I ever shipped anything at all.

What I’m finding these past few days is that one of the worst blows to the ego is having to ship something that really isn’t awesome yet. For example, I’m rolling out StringTheory for Javascript today. It will be a great little tool eventually, but I’ve got to ship a first version that is literally about as minimal as you can go. It’s so minimal as to seem silly. Still, that is the deal. I’m shipping something, and it is up to me to have a vision for what I ship and to follow through and realize that vision over time.

Speaking of shipping things, here’s a status report:

Two more projects have rolled out. If you’re keeping track, I’m now at eight days and have shipped four projects. I told you it wasn’t natural to ship software like this!

Here are the projects:

Built Software website

Ordinarily I wouldn’t declare a website migration to be “software”, but the website is now rocking a shiny new Django home. Django is a great platform and I’m hoping to add new and interesting features to the site over time. WE GOTS PONIES Y’ALL!!!

One thing that is awesome about Django is that you have easy and total control over your URLs. So if you go to the new site and see a page with the extension “.shtml”, that’s not actually an html page. That’s Django pretending there’s actually a file with that name. I was able to pull over the site to the new environment without having to mess with the navigation. I think that’s a win. Over time I’ll migrate away from file names. I’ll also get a new look and feel going. I’m tired of looking at that site every day!

StringTheory for JavaScript

Back in 2002 or 2003 I rolled out what I thought was a viable commercial library called StringTheory™, which I called a “text engine”. Unfortunately I was high from sniffing glue or something, and no one ever bought it. I do think there were some good ideas there though, and even back then I wanted to do a Javascript version. So now I have. It’s very early stage, but it’s usable and I plan to make a proper open source project out of it soon. If you do a lot of text work in Javascript give it a look. More importantly, give me feedback. This is one of those projects that not enough people looked at early on. As a result a lot of useless cruft got piled onto the original Java version. I’d like this new release to be lean and mean, and I can’t do it without input from the people who might actually use it.

Thanks again for the encouragement.