I did it: The postmortem of doing 31 features in 31 days | Hacker News Reader

I did it: The postmortem of doing 31 features in 31 days

enjoysthin.gs

33 pointstedroden15 comments

I didn't know about enjoythin.gs, thanks at least for that.

I really like the look of the page with all the different images together. In fact, I'm more interested in just scrolling down the page than clicking on the different links (even though they do look interesting)

Ahh yeah. The images can be fun to look at... there is also an image only viewer: http://enjoysthin.gs/explore/images

Interesting site, it's fun to explore. It might be nice to display content inside the cell itself once clicked, or in a lightbox, as the back/forward through history is quite jarring.

Agreed. I'm probably not going to do a lightbox, but I need a much smoother way of going from one thing to the next.

Definitely not lightbox.

I actually like the homepage better because all the images are re-framed into the same square, producing a (kind of) random piece of the image. It reminds me of some pop-art collage.

I had never heard of this, and I have to say I really like it. Your personality really comes through in this web site. So often I go to sites and just think "who cares", even if it's doing something cool, because I can't see anything that clue's me in that it was a unique item made by human beings.

And too often a web site will actually just say "we are ordinary people with a passion for...". But that's insulting to their audience. It's the small things in the design that make this site unique. I hope you grow a great community out of this.

Wow! Thanks for the kind words. I decided early on to be as honest as possible about everything with this site.

Sometimes that means my personality shows through in the design and other aspects, other times it means that I rail against youtube for a few paragraphs in the public changelog/blog.

Seems like the opposite of the 37 signals way... aren't you supposed to introduce fewer features that are well thought out?

(Not saying that's the only way, but it seems more sensible than building loads of features really quickly without giving much thought to them.. after all, extra features increase the complexity/difficulty of both user experience and maintenance)

Yeah, it's definitely a trade off. I'm not sure I agree with the 37 signals way though.

A good example of my issue with them is their highrise product. It took over a year from launch [1] before they had any type of bulk editing [2] features. Simplicity is one thing, but that is a long time for a feature that really should have been there at launch... or close to it.

[1] http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/329-launch-highrise [2] http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/908-tiny-projects-keep-it...

How many hours a day did you put in on average?

I generally worked from about 10pm (after tucking the wife in) until 2am. I have a full time job in the R&D lab at the New York Times, so I was super careful not too push it too far.

I found that I can function pretty well on 5-6 hours of sleep.

Well, congrats. That's some determination.

Thanks!

Awesome concept, I'm jealous of Ted's drive and motivation

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