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As a longtime reader of Clive Thompson’s weblog, Collision Detection, I’m no stranger to the concept of “radical transparency“, which Thompson described in a recent Wired article. After all, here we are, posting entries in a weblog as we try to hack together a website which approximates the ideas we put in a business plan for a contest six months ago.
But it’s harder than we realized. Things will get easier, I suspect, when we have an actual site we can share with you; right now, my gut feeling is that talking about the site is promoting buzz about “vaporware.” When it’s real, we can talk about it, you can see what we’re talking about, and this weblog can be a conversation between you and us about how we can improve it.
Even the development process is hard to talk about. As you may have figured out, we’re working with Ruby on Rails, which has dramatically improved the time it takes to get us from ideas to HTML in the browser; both Noah and I have extensive experience in LAMP, and working in this framework is positively eye-opening. But we’re new at it, no question. We discover new things every day, every hour, and we spend a certain amount of time going back and re-doing things we’ve already done because we’ve discovered a way to do them better.
Discussing the details of every new discovery, things everyone else who’s been using Rails for months longer than we have already knows, doesn’t seem like a way to engender confidence in our users and potential investors. It’s scary stuff.
Instead, I find myself writing 300-word micro-essays as comments on tickets in our internal Trac system. (Trac, by the way, I am in love with. Have I mentioned that?)
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