Culling

Last week I wrote about defining my goals a bit more carefully, making sure that projects I undertake fit who I want to be and how I feel, set in the context of what I’m capable of. Part of that meant making some hard decisions about which projects I’ll put in my backlog, and which projects I’ll drop altogether. The work I’d started on a Manuscript integration is one of the latter.

Working on Indigo reminded me that taking on a project is more than just hitting ⌘+N, writing the code, and putting it out into the world; in fact, the development part of the project lifecycle might not even be the bulk of of the work. The bigger chunk of the work comes from maintaining it indefinetly; do you want to continue improving that project for the rest of your life?

(No, I probably won’t work on any given project for the rest of my life, but I still think it’s worth framing it that way, because it forces me to place a very high value on my time.)

Indigo is something that I’ll continue working on, as it powers my personal site. Per is something that I use often, so I’ll continue maintaining it (despite my lack of frequency in updating the app).

The reality is, however, that I probably won’t get much use out of a Manuscript integration that pulls in reviews from the App Store, because there’s just no volume there for my own apps. That means if and when it breaks, I won’t notice until users start having a bad experience. That’s… not great.

So, the project is being archived. If you’re a Manuscript user and you’re interested in the idea, let me know and I’m happy to walk you through what I’ve got so far.

More tk.