{"id":7877,"date":"2011-02-19T00:03:25","date_gmt":"2011-02-19T04:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7877"},"modified":"2011-02-18T11:59:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-18T15:59:21","slug":"if-you%e2%80%99re-not-embarrassed-when-you-ship-your-first-version-you-waited-too-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/02\/19\/if-you%e2%80%99re-not-embarrassed-when-you-ship-your-first-version-you-waited-too-long\/","title":{"rendered":"“If you\u2019re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.<\/p>\n

What killed us was \u201cone more thing.\u201d We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said \u201cfinished,\u201d and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it\u2019s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you\u2019re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Usage is like oxygen for ideas<\/strong>. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you\u2019ve created until it\u2019s out there. That means every moment you\u2019re working on something without it being in the public it\u2019s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It\u2019s even worse because development doesn\u2019t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven\u2019t even imagined that disrupts the market you\u2019re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams\u2019 Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)<\/p>\n

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage: There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[484,513,92,138],"class_list":["post-7877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-competition","tag-research","tag-software","tag-wordpress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-233","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7879,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions\/7879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}