A month ago, all the developers in the office spent two days working on interesting small projects, the idea being that at the end of that time we'd have a bunch of cool shippable features. Though it was encouraged to work on useful, sensible things, this was not a requirement.
Anyway, I felt great until 4pm on the Friday, when we presented our creations. Afterwards, I felt flat (as one often does after meeting a deadline or finishing a series of exams). I didn't want the excitement to end.
As I was walking home I had an idea. For some reason I wanted to share thoughts in 72pt Helvetica. I didn't want to broadcast them (I was melancholic after all), but I felt compelled to express them visually.
I began to think about how this might be done. The Web seemed like the obvious platform. I wondered whether it could be done without a database. I remembered something I had heard on a podcast about a site that allowed one play musical notes on a computer keyboard, and would encode these in the URL for easy playback.
This seemed a lot more interesting than sharing my moody thoughts, and now that I had something cool to work on I no longer felt the need to do so anyway.
I think I spent 40 hours working on it that first weekend (yes, I was consumed). I truly believed that I could ship it before showering and leaving for work on Monday! Doing so would have been a mistake – I'm pleased that I spent several weeks ironing out the kinks and integrating with bit.ly and Twitter.
Anyway, I felt great until 4pm on the Friday, when we presented our creations. Afterwards, I felt flat (as one often does after meeting a deadline or finishing a series of exams). I didn't want the excitement to end.
As I was walking home I had an idea. For some reason I wanted to share thoughts in 72pt Helvetica. I didn't want to broadcast them (I was melancholic after all), but I felt compelled to express them visually.
I began to think about how this might be done. The Web seemed like the obvious platform. I wondered whether it could be done without a database. I remembered something I had heard on a podcast about a site that allowed one play musical notes on a computer keyboard, and would encode these in the URL for easy playback.
This seemed a lot more interesting than sharing my moody thoughts, and now that I had something cool to work on I no longer felt the need to do so anyway.
I think I spent 40 hours working on it that first weekend (yes, I was consumed). I truly believed that I could ship it before showering and leaving for work on Monday! Doing so would have been a mistake – I'm pleased that I spent several weeks ironing out the kinks and integrating with bit.ly and Twitter.