Last day

Has it really been 5 weeks since last update? A quick catalog of what's happened since then.

It's so weird to look back on the last post and see "YUI toolkit". We ditched YUI for Mootools, mostly because the Windoo extensions had a resize handle implementation that we could use off-the-shelf. And then we ditched Mootools for jQuery because apparently the Mootools community is a bunch of arrogant pricks (heard secondhand, but heard from many people) and jQuery is where the momentum is now. Of course, jQuery doesn't have a resize handle plugin (or many of the things in Mootools or YUI really, though it's getting better fast), so I had to write one myself. That took like a week.

We've now got a pretty good library of jQuery stuff - 3 plugins and a documenter/dependency analyzer, which I hope to release as open-source.

I sometimes worry if we're wasting too much time on ancillary tools and not spending enough on the core product. Really, a majority of the time has been spent on tools, server setup, prototypes, learning other tools, etc. And this has been convenient in some regards (one-click deployment, w00t), but I can't help wondering what the state of the product would be if the time had been invested in it instead. And now I'm doing a little widget for DevHouseBoston3 that isn't really related to the product but which might give us a better chance of being accepted to yCombinator. I feel like I really just need to devote a big solid block of time to just pushing stuff out and get it done.

Speaking of which, today was my last day at my day job. It's kinda bittersweet, I guess - these important life transitions always are. But I really can't do both that and the startup, and I'm not willing to let the startup go. Now I'm free to work crazy hours and hack crazy stuff. Liberating, but a little scary.

The IP release was a big bust. My employer wouldn't sign it, so the approx. $1K it cost and 5 weeks it took is basically down the drain. Well, technically the cost isn't, since my pay for those 5 weeks is more than it cost. But the time hurts. I hope that it doesn't cost us our market opportunity.

Moreover, it made my boss think that we had something nefarious going on. (How could he not have heard of similar agreements? Steve Wozniak had one!) I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

Anyway, it's all behind us. Tomorrow - or maybe even tonight, depending on if I can get the cloudmaps for DevHouseBoston done tonight - I get to really put in some time on the game creation engine. It's exciting.