14th
EventBox - The Past, Present and Future
It has been quite a long time since we started the development of EventBox and we’ve learned several important lessons along our way. It is time to step back and take a look at the big picture.
The Past
Development of EventBox in its current form began around the beginning of 2008. The idea came from fusing two demo apps - one for Digg and another for Flickr. It became apparent that we were reinventing the wheel with each web service client, the only difference being the representation - the underlying architecture and code were very similar.
We decided it was worth trying to see if we could come up with something that worked for different types of services. It was supposed to be a small little project, just an experiment, in how far we could take things.
Behind Closed Doors
EventBox has been developed in secrecy longer than it has been out (2.5 times more time spent under cover). We were progressing very fast in the beginning although we were going backwards and forwards for quite a bit of time realizing that we made some assumptions which turned out to be wrong. Our initial development process taught us a very important lesson - think before you start implementing.
We found that in a lot of cases we were thinking very narrowly. For example, if we needed some of functionality, we would quickly come up with a solution only to realize it is a subset of what was really needed. The more EventBox matured, the more generalizations we had a place and consequently we had a better framework in providing user end features.
After several months of work and many days spent in front computers screens, it started to feel like our pet project was becoming too big and important for me. It wasn’t just “my free time” hobby anymore. Eventually, EventBox became my top priority. There was no other project more important than it.
Stuck
After about 4-5 months of constant 14/7 work, we started to feel tired. Being occupied every second of every day soon takes its toll and slows you down in many ways. You might be working 14 hours a day but you are not progressing as fast you might wish. Prolonged periods of exhaustion ultimately lead to lowered productivity even though you wanted to achieve the opposite.
What was even worse is that we could not see the end of the road. How long do we stay under cover and keep working? Every single day brought new features and improvements. Paradoxically, the more features we had, the more we needed to add (see Featuritis). This is unsustainable in the long run and it had to stop. The question is when do we stop adding features?
After giving it a considerable amount of thoughts, we came to the conclusion that we need to slow down in terms of amount of features and focus more on the depth. Due to the nature of EventBox, the potential growth in terms of features is almost unbounded. Take any web service which provides an API. Implement it. We can keep doing this forever and we will never release anything.
We decided to release our app despite the known shortcomings. It had to be done sooner or later - there was no ideal timing, we will always have more things to add. So we released the beta in the beginning of November 2008.
The Present
The experience since the launch of the beta has been overwhelming in both positive and negative ways. I’m very happy that we have active users and that they like our application. I would like to take the chance and thank everyone who was involved with EventBox in some way or other. It would have been impossible without you. Thank you.
Thanks are also due to our critics. We hear you and appreciate your views. It has been quite a learning experience for us and we value constructive criticism.
The Future
Where are we going now? For last 3 months we’ve been actively working on updates and bringing them to our users. Are we going to satisfy every potential user of EventBox? Probably not. Are we going to have each and every possible feature? Probably not. Are we going to support every web service? Probably not. But I am certain that we will be doing our very best in improving EventBox for the foreseeable future.
