> Are you planning write a postmortem on this project?
Chris has a keynote at splashcon 2018 about this: https://2018.splashcon.org/event/splash-2018-keynotes-agains...
I'm trying to pen some of my thoughts as well, but it's taken a long time to try and distill some of these things into something comprehensible. Sometimes I don't even understand why we did some things :P
> From my outsider perspective, it seems like you were trying to build a "silver bullet". For example, both FiveSquare Eve and WikiEve look promising. FiveSquare could be a great WYSIWYG website/app builder. WikiEve could be a great note taking tool. Just because they aren't the future of programming, doesn't mean they aren't useful!
I think you're right about that. I think several times we could have taken a prototype Eve and made it a product people would have paid money to use. Many people said "Why don't you just make relational excel, that would go a long way to being a good useful product" and we basically did that in Grid Eve.
But every time we were tempted to monetize some artifact of Eve and call it a business, we had to remind ourselves that what we had didn't really address the original problem: programming needs to be easier. And this was the right move, because if we had stopped at WikiEve or Grid Eve or whatever version and iterated on it until it was a product, then we would have missed out on learning a lot more.