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I recently bought Shaun Inman's book "Lift Off", which was essentially his development journal for an awesome iOS game he created called The Last Rocket. Althou
by aculver 13y ago
I recently bought Shaun Inman's book "Lift Off", which was essentially his development journal for an awesome iOS game he created called The Last Rocket. Although the journal wasn't public while he was writing it, he bundled it up later started selling it for $10. When a couple friends and I started talking about creating an iOS game, I bought the book and read it in a weekend. It was worth every penny.
The thing that impressed me the most was that he wrote, and made some progress, almost everyday. Also, it wasn't polished or article-y at all. It was just candid journaling.
I found it so motivating that when I recently started working on a new product myself (http://churnbuster.io/ http://churnbuster.io/) I decided to do the same thing. I'm keeping a journal (http://productquest.andrewculver.org/ http://productquest.andrewculver.org/) totally separate from the product blog, product mailing list, etc. that conveys my experience as I build a product, rather than trying to market the product itself.
The journal serves a couple purposes: It keeps me accountable to keep development coming along regularly. Also, it helps me connect with other product people or people who want to get into creating products. (They're more likely than the average person to be a potential customer for the product.) Also, any audience the development journal may gain can help amplify the announcement when the product is ready to launch.
- kroger 13y agoThanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out. Here's the link for those who are interested as well (there are a few "Lift Off" books around): http://store.shauninman.com http://store.shauninman.com
- swanson 13y agoThis is really cool Andrew, thanks for sharing!
- vidarh 13y agoI think you'll quickly find another benefit of journalling: It forces you to justify your decisions. Even if you only write for yourself, many ideas "sound smart" in your head, but don't seem all that bright when they've been put in writing and you re-read them. You also get invaluable documentation of justifications for what you do. And the effect multiplies when you decide to publish it. I keep sporadically working on a series about writing a compiler in Ruby, which morphed into writing a Ruby compiler in Ruby, and it's a slow going slog (I just ended a two year "break"), and writing about it quickly started changing my approach. It's like when your maths teacher insist you show your working rather than just giving the results - you can't skip steps just because you know (or think you know) how to go straight from A to B any more. Of course when writing a journal, nobody is forcing you to not take shortcuts, but I find I am more likely to be disciplined about verifying assumptions an testing changes anyway.