Dear Tim,
I did a very brave thing – I put a link to Kalmany on reddit.
It’s actually got a lot of positive feedback, and not too many issues. So far it’s still a little baby in terms of development, but now it’s in the public eye. And I haven’t stopped stressing about it.
I don’t know how I’ll sleep knowing that I’ve brought the spotlight on me. I’ve now made Kalmany a publicly facing site, attracting people to look at it, discover it, and share it. What will happen next, who knows? But looks like I’ll need to fast-track all my refinement.
The big question is “was it ready?” I would say, not really, but ready enough that you could use it. At least I thought so, until it reached a limit on my SES quota on AWS i.e. somehow I had sent 200 emails in a day. A day!? I have approximately 50 users so I don’t know how they managed to do that. Repeated sends of ‘verify email’ maybe? Ah well, I’ve disabled the verification so now the email is solely used for retrieving a password. Nothing else.
I’ve made some further modifications just to make it more readable – changed the government spending graph to be more obvious, change the authentication form so it’s more clear what its for. But these are all aesthetic changes and I haven’t changed much to the system. I’ll be curious if it remains popular and people keep looking at it, if I get a steady increase in user activity. If I can reach twenty-thousand users then I know I’ll have succeeded.
But it’s stressed me out, that’s the main point to take away. You’d think after making a reddit post, I’d walk away, but turns out in a situation like this I get massive stage fright. Oddly enough, I don’t get actual stage fright. But here, when something I’ve made is now being looked at and sued? It’s not the criticism. It’s not the praise. It’s the pressure that now I’ve said, “this thing exists” and people will now have expectations and I have to provide for those expectations. I have the very birth of a community maybe (if it gains traction). What if they love it? Do I need to maintain it? What if they hate it? Do I need to change it?
It’s funny because I’ve always looked objectively at other people’s projects, but this one has had work done for four months! It’s mine! Everything’s changed…
I suppose the real fear I have is that old “impostor syndrome”. I’m afraid I’ll be revealed as a hack. My coding isn’t great. My work is shoddy. I might be revealed to be a shell of a coder or developer, and then what?
I don’t know. Nonetheless, it’s only been twelve hours of having a public presence. Who knows how it will fare. It may instantly fizzle out. I kind of would like it to fizzle out, then I can continue developing and it may gradually grow. A sudden burst of interest would be the worst thing I think, because it might get ripped down before it has a chance to grow. Like a playground hyped up, opened, and then destroyed by criticism, regulation, and overuse by the children and parents. That’s a strange metaphor but it kind of describes how I feel.
Some of things that are now more apparent to me are:
- The Demographies page does not have colours for certain values and so ends up being a bit grayish.
- The Elections page in the user area may be confusing.
- The Rankings Table is hard to view in mobile and needs a redesign.
- The Assembly Feed on mobile is a bit unwieldly and could do with some work.
And yet I still want to implement time and I’ve not advanced that objective in a while. The database schema have all been updated to version 2 and they’re ready and waiting to be utilised, but I’ve not nailed my logic for state changes, and I’m uncertain if I could even design a system that will reflect things naturally as well as logically. It’s worrying. Especially now people CAN SEE IT.
I was even looking at my old monument idea. What if that’s a bad idea? A cop out? Oh the pain of making it public…
The monument concept, if I haven’t already explained it, is to have it so every week there’d be a sort of competition where, a constituency that wins a certain criteria will get a monument that affects the logic of the citizens and their rankings. The starting monument I considered was a large cow skull, that would be given to the constituency with the largest Greater Bovine following, and it would make those who follow the Greater Bovine happier. Something tangible but not too much. And this would repeat week on week, so after a year, each constituency may have anywhere between 0 and 5 of these things, helping to define their cultural identities.
Maybe they should start off with a couple of these…
I’m scared. I’ll say it plainly, I’m scared. Who knows how it will pan out, but I can say that it’s likely, and that I hope, it’ll fizzle out. And I can continue in semi-anonymity. Peace. I hope.
Anyway, I hear you’re in Paris. I shall meet you there – the first time in seventeen years. I’ve got the left goat horn. If you have the right one, we will be able to reveal the secret beneath the Louvre together. I just hope that the Pope doesn’t find out what we’re up to so we should speak in code from now on. I’ll pop the weasel, as soon as you blow the whistle. Wrestle the trees and we’ll keel over on fire. Where is place? Conflabulations.
Yours,
Stan
WoodenSocks 