Comment by tigerthink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tigerthink | Hacker News Reader

Hm, I'm inclined to think it would have taken me somewhat less time than that. I made this site in about one month:

http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/

Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.

But I'm not the fastest:

http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries

I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5 minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?

Yours is a beautiful site, I'm impressed!

There's a few reasons why I think I took so long. Listed, in order of time taken:

1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product.

2. Design. I'm a poor designer, and it took me about 7 iterations to get to the version you see now.

3. Fixing bugs. There's just so many of them.

4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)

5. Working on it part time

"Yours is a beautiful site, I'm impressed!"

Thanks. Actually I did everything but the design :-P

"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product."

Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few weeks of learning before that.

"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"

Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the option of renting more for $1/month/IP.

I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.

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