北京 2008 has begun. My friends and I have already started things off with a bang by participating in an opening ceremonies drinking game. We had to drink if any of the following were mentioned by the announcers:

• Human rights violations
• Pollution
• The athletes' ceremonial uniforms
• "The 29th Olympiad"

When I wrote the Forms feature for Google Spreadsheets, there was this constant voice in my head that was telling me to step back and consider the big picture in order to improve what I had written already. "You can do better than that" it was saying. "There's got to be an easier method for doing this." I sincerely wanted it to be architecturally perfect so that when we launched, I could be proud of what I had done as only my second real project on the Spreadsheets team.

Turns out, it's never going to be perfect. Whether it's user interaction or API design, there's a balance that one has to reach between making the implementation better and simply launching the thing. Thank god for deadlines.

Seems simple, right? Even Paul has mapped it out for everyone out there making things.

But most new designers and programmers want to sprint before they can crawl. Change lives instantly. Launch a thousand features at once. Make the design epic. Kick ass, basically. So they persist, exhibiting the stubborn, perfectionist behaviors that probably make them good at what they do to begin with.

And it's not like the users make it any easier, right? Once you launch there's always the scrutiny, the trash-talking, the coverage about how your product sucks and how you missed the mark because you didn't launch that one feature because you didn't have enough time.¹

So, start small. Just get it out there and as one of my engineering directors oh-so-eloquently put it, "iterate on the damn thing." As you get better, "small" has a different meaning for you, and you can launch features in parallel with refactoring the code to make it one step closer to "perfect" while satisfying your users' want for more. At least I hope that's what happens when you get better.

Just don't get lost in this endless cycle of iteration and improvement that end with your project getting cancelled. Users (and management) don't give a crap about just refactoring. They care about features and speed and deliverables and "makes your toast for you" holycrapWOW functionality. There's no rule that striving to be perfect and delivering have to be in opposition, though. So satisfy yourself and go holycrapWOW someone at the same time.

Funny how the recent nice weather seemingly became a catalyst for my (somewhat) luddite friends to adopt Twitter. The attractiveness of the service was lost in me since so many in my close social circle were signed up, so I followed a few "A-list" bloggers and didn't really get much out of it. Now that my followers group has reached a tipping point, it's become more fun. This is why startups thrive in good climates. If my friends and I lived in this weather all the time then I think we'd turn into the early-adopting, techno-hipsters that litter¹ the streets of San Francisco and the Valley instead of the callused, cynical, east-coast bitters that belong in my afternoon Negroni².

Either you will it to happen, or it just won't.

This is a site about me, Andy Bons. I'm actually unclear whether that last sentence is grammatically correct, or if I just spelled "gramatically" correctly or not. The point of the story is that after months of designing mockups, snipping concepts, researching grid design, reading The Elements of Typographic Style and presumably accruing web site design knowledge from my job as a front-end developer at Google, I still just couldn't finalize any of it. Everything was always a nice little box of knowledge that I tucked away never to be opened or consolidated later.

I could say something like "No more! I will post updates daily and people will read!" but let's be honest with ourselves here. No one's reading yet. This is just to prove to myself that I can actually dust the crud off of my current web site and take another crack at assembling an online reputation worth a thousand twitter followers. Because that's what really matters, dammit. Betcha didn't know that 'dammit' was spelled without the 'n', huh? Yeah you probably did, actually. April 14th, 10:27pm