I'd suggest shipping something soon. Give yourself a deadline of a week or so to get something, anything out the door and in someone's hand. Any little feedback you get early on will be invaluable and validate/ realign your mission.
It doesn't even have to be all fancy and coded up. Any little thing would do once it demonstrates your idea.
:) I think I understand your position, because I'm living it right now. I've found that at times like this, what helps is:
* Actually take a day off, don't pretend to be productive, actually walk away and don't feel guilty about it. Everyone needs a break.
* Get some perspective. Take two steps back, and remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing. Screw, 'becoming a success,' there's a bigger reason that you're making something. Tumblr has fan mail posted all over their fridge [http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4f0e2ff7ecad04b0640... ] and, I've printed out and stuck up some positive facebook comments and emails from our users. It's a lot harder to procrastinate when you know that you have an audience.
* Start over something. There's mixed opinions on this, obviously you should try to get it mostly right the first time, and iterate rather than scrapping and restarting at a whim, but sometimes the invitation of a blank canvas can get you over the wall.
* Embrace your ritual. There could be something, some process that you use when you need to get started on something... As counter-productive as it seems, whenever I'm about to start a big project, I sit down for a night and clear my harddrive, and set up a fresh installation of my Linux distro... the act of 'cleaning out my workbench,' frees me up to start working again..
So far it's a wonderful read, and a good example of thoughtful systems design... Incidentally, it's also shows one of the real benefits of Literate Programming, cause although the source itself doesn't really concern me, the text is gold.
Thanks for taking the time cgag :)
The 'non-obvious' aspects was exactly what I'm trying to weed out going forward.
I've built some demos before- enough to appreaciate 'The Clojure Way' of doing things over my experiences with other tools... but what I've really been struggling with was the methodology of development- how do I start a project, how much documentation is appropriate, keeping a tidy source tree, refactoring etc...
I started using IRC just on your reccomendation and, it's one of my favourite things on the internet now :) I'm not sure why I didn't start using it eariler :D
I was hesitant to share because the target auidence isn't exactly HN, but I imagine that they're lots of clever people here who'd be able to emphasize anyways.
I know that it's not the best example of responsive design and that it's basically a sandcaste* so I was hoping for some general design mistakes that I can learn from before I rebuild the site. Particularly things that're unintuitive or out of place.
Thanks,
Jean-Le
*I needed to complete a prototype for a competition so I ended up building a sandcaste out of javascript-- Should've used wordpress for the demo... but in the heat of everything and with writing my own final exams, I just kept building it was a single page monster with ALL of the notes being stored in the javascript file >.< Seriously... when you click a new note, it just replaces the contents of an <article>... my logic being that all the extra text in the javascript cost less bandwith than a picture.
I plan to build most of the backend stuff in Clojure, so if anyone has any advice on that it's very welcome.
noteZilla's well designed btw. It's also beautiful as an observer, but, if I were trying to use it as a performer I'd be thrown off by the varying placeholder speed and page turns [as others mentioned]... maybe that should be your toggle if you want to accomodate that auidence — a 'performance mode' which shows multiple lines and a consistent rhythm with highlights around the active bar.
And, I think I will share even though I'm ashamed atm.
That terrifying moment when you think that your project is on the front page [http://notezil.la ] when it's really a completly unrelated website with the same name >.<
It doesn't even have to be all fancy and coded up. Any little thing would do once it demonstrates your idea.