a glob of nerdishness

When you’ve been taught that shipping an embarrassing “version one” means you shipped early enough, then it’s hard to be embarrassed by such a release.

On the self-imposed deadline of February’s end, I called the progress I’ve made on ShutterStem so far and named it “version one”. By the time I got around to actually tagging the “1.0″ release in version control, the source code had already gained an additional contributor with support for an additional version of OS X. And a bit of documentation.

Two months ago I had whittled down the insurmountable task of going from version 0.1 to version The World Is O’ertaken, into a outline of requirements in an otherwise empty repository branch called “take_two”. These requirements focused on a primary metabolism of the amateur photography workflow: breathe in, pick images to share, breathe out.

It’s interesting to see how version 1.0 differs from its original requirements; projects always do and are often better for it. It’s less fun to see what suffered for the deadline. Hence the “early enough”: it sets up like a <artistic analogy regarding difficulty>, it looks like a <deprecating humor regarding homeliness>, and certain parts got shipped in a <one hundred percent half-assed state>.

But it works.

I was sitting around the house one evening, pouting about how pitiful my project was as I used it on an iPad. My wife was nearby with her laptop, helping me collect images into baskets. Organizing the same photo library, via completely different devices, over only the local network. The mainframe across the room was no longer just a big hard drive behind a big screen, but also a server — and not even the server! — as we relaxed over on the couch and enjoyed paging through photos together.

I think it’s got a shot.