The best and the worst…

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When I was in college I interned at a DOD-funded think tank. It was there that I first learned about the value of doing postmortems.

Let me tell you - if you slipped and fell on the ice, they had guys analyzing the ice, your shoes and filing a report on it before you’d even dusted yourself off. I can only imagine how busy they must be these days…

In that spirit, I offer you the most helpful and least helpful things I did this year.

Brilliant!

1. Sticking my neck out there in front of the whole world with my product idea and my blog and daring the world to throw eggs at me. (for some reason, they didn’t)
2. Networking with fellow mISVers.
3. Scaling back my plans for an epic live-chat ticket-tracking email-handeling onion-dicing love-letter-writing Solution, and focusing on writing a great chat application.
4. Porting my back end from beautiful Python to crude, stuttering PHP - and finding out that I was getting a hell of a lot done (and opening up my app to the self-hosted market).
5. Using ext-js and abandoning Django.

How dumb could you be?

1. Writing a desktop application framework (with data-binding) around wxPython. Yep. You heard me. In the end, it worked. It was even cool in places. But was a colossal waste of time.
2. Focusing too much on “big ideas” without worrying too much about practicality.
3. Getting stuck in the trap of thinking “I need x before I can get started on my real product, so I’ll write x and then build my product around it”…here’s a hint. BUY “x”