In the Beginning
I would always hear about people who wrote simple pieces of software, who were in the right spot, at the right time, and their stuff got used and they became famous, and.. perhaps even rich.
Every time I heard such a story, my baby tyrant would say: “I want that! Lets DO that!”
To which my Fuddy-grownup would say, “Honey, you probably won’t become famous, and it probably won’t work out. Are you sure?”
And the Couch-Buddy would say, “Ah, too much work. Lets read some more facebook.”
I Made a Decision
I started coding this thing that I thought would be a good start of things. It was an app to make reading twitter easier – less context switches. It was also an experiment in using Azure, Visual Studio Online, and a little bit in starting bootstrap from scratch.
I got it working.
I started the code 7/26/2015, and by 9/22/2015 I was ready for the big time. This was mostly an hour or two during a workweek in the evenings, and maybe an hour or two on a Sunday morning.
I had a logo created, bought a bootstrap style, I had added what I thought were the key features I needed, I rebranded it, and I bought a domain name.
I stopped.
And then life got complicated, and I let it sit – costing me monthly $, btw. $17 per month to keep it hosted at the cheapest level I could get away with, AND have a domain name. I used it for a while.
Eventually, I got cheap, and work distributed a full MSDN license to me with an azure subscription, so I nuked it.
I’m letting it go.
Very recently, I put it back online under my MSDN license – You can use it here:
I’ve cleaned up the code that I deployed, removed all the passwordly bits from it, and uploaded it to github. Here’s the guts of it:
https://github.com/sunnywiz/twit-sort/blob/master/azuremvcapp1/Controllers/ReadController.cs
Letting go the dreams as well
I would have liked to have seen this thing become better.
- I could have done a face lift on the front page. Too many words. Replace with screenshots of the configuration page and the read page.
- I could have made it more colorful. Orange and Blue! You can see this in the icon a bit.
- I could have made it front-end js only, with no server side talking to twitter, using local-storage for persistence
- I could have added “click hashtag or username” to create additional groupings on the fly. delete groupings on the fly as well.
The good news is, all these dreams live on, in a future project – that works with Facebook, instead of Twitter
Conclusion
Letting this one go to make psychic room for other things that interest me. May it bless others. If you write a good one like this I’ll use it.
