The Agile Micro ISV Blog » Sprint

T Minus 32 Days

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:31:41 +0000

I didn’t get as much done over the weekend as I would have liked.
But that was almost inevitable. Family and sleep are proving to be two
big time sinks. If only I could eliminate one of them……

I think I’ve settled on the index schema now. I think. I’ve now got OCR‘d
documents being added to the index, the next step is to allow for
search and navigation. Well, navigation will really be a different kind
of search, but no matter. I’d certainly recommend Lucene for any micro ISVers looking to implement information retrieval. It’s a pleasure to work with.

Because I have a full time consulting gig, work on Home Document
Manager during the week will be limited to a couple of hours per night.
Red Bull is hereby appointed to be the official Micro ISV drink.

Repeat after me: “Red Bull is your friend. Red Bull is your friend.”

T Minus 34 Days

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:16:46 +0000

Did
the first big session after fixing the release date. After getting the
kids to bed and spending just a little time with the wife, I think I
probably managed to do from about 10pm to about 4am.

I had more Red Bull’s than I care to mention, and had several bouts of heart palpitations, but no matter.

The visual tree of the application is complete, along with the necessary resources for colours, brushes and styles etc.

I have the Commands set up to successfully OCR a scanned image.

Tonight, I plan (Red Bull stocks permitting) to get the indexing
formalised, and to establish the data bindings between the index,
document store and the folder tree. Hopefully I’ll also be able to
establish the bindings to the list view and preview window.

I’m releasing my product on 1st August 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

A while ago I gave someone some advice on how to get fit if you do
an IT job. I said that for me, saying “I’m going to get fit” doesn’t
work, it’s too fuzzy, too wishy washy, there’s no time frame, no sense
of success or failure. What worked for me in the past is this:

Find a sprint triathlon in your area that’s about 2 to 3 months away.
Enter it. Actually send off a cheque – commit.
Tell your friends and family you’ve entered it.
Tell your blog readers you’ve entered it.
Go to BeginnerTriathlete.com and get a couch-to-sprint training program.
Stick to the training program religiously.

I found that the fixed time frame, combined with the knowledge that
friends and coworkers were going to check my performance on the web
site after the event was a huge driver. The fear of failing publicly
was too much to bear. I trained. My God I trained. The event nearly
killed me, but it worked. It absolutely worked.

I’m finding a bit of a similar feeling creeping in on what I think of as my micro ISV project. A little sensation of drift, a feeling that there’s no time frame involved.

Enough. Mark my words well. Failure is not an option. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to get specific.

Home Document Manager v1.0 will be released on the 1st of August 2008

I feel a little bit inspired by the recent 30 day sprints. I’m cheating a little, I have 34 and a bit days to do it.

34 days and counting.