I launched a site today

It takes a number and divides it by 86,400. The next iteration will include functionality to take a number and multiply by 86,400. Amazing right?

The site has no design. I don't have a business plan. I don't have sales, marketing, QA, or anyone else. And I couldn't care less.

I realized today that I agree with "release early, release often", that I try to live by those words when I can, but as a developer you only have so much control over what your boss thinks, plans, schedules, and so on. At night you're perfectly free to release any sort of crap you want, when you want to, and similar to my recent post on testing, I've realized I need to just get over my desire to perfect things and refactor ad infinitum, and just ship something.

So the site is simple. It basically does nothing right now but convert the number of requests per day into what it'd be in requests per second. This came out of a discussion with Topfunky who was wondering what 8 million requests a day would be in RPS. It was a perfect example feature to spawn the launch of www.builtbythenet.com

The idea is simple--GitHub brings you "Social Code Hosting" right? Well, think of this as Social Site Building. Users can submit feature requests at http://builtbythenet.uservoice.com/, vote for other's ideas, and take part in building a site like never before, because not only do the users drive development, the code is completely open: http://github.com/jackdempsey/builtbythenet/tree/master

People often say "I'd love to learn Merb, but am tired of building blogs. What should I build?" Well, now you have something else to try out. I imagine, at least I hope, that over time some great ideas will come out of the ether. The possibilities are endless. The 'goal' in my mind is less about what the end result is, and more about the process and the features along the way. I don't think this will ever be finished. Maybe in a few weeks it'll fall flat on its face and oh no, I'm out a $9.95 domain name. But at least I'll have tried...and if all that comes of this is another example of some Merb code, that's good enough for me.