Shipping isn't enough I have been working a little bit recently on the new version of File Phantom but I've been working way way way more on the currently released version but I'm not creating bug fixes for it or creating patches. I'm working on marketing or better documentation or the website for the product or refining the payment system to handle the transactions better or any number of mundane, back end tasks that no one is going to be awesomely impressed with but it's a part of the process of launching code. When I started building File Phantom, I did it because I thought it would be a cool programming project to work on. I do very little programming for File Phantom compared to what I used to do. It's all part of what it takes to create a product and ship it and then support it.

Coding Horror has a great post on shipping code. He writes...

A smart software developer knows that there's no point in writing code if it's code that nobody will see, code that nobody will use, code that nobody will ultimately benefit from. Why build a permanently vacant house?

A smart software developer realizes that their job is far more than writing code and shipping it; their job is to build software that people will actually want to use. That encompasses coding, sure, but it also includes a whole host of holistic, non-coding activities that are critical to the overall success of the software. Things like documentation, interaction design, cultivating user community, all the way up to the product vision itself. If you get that stuff wrong, it won't matter what kind of code you've written.

If, like Rich Skrenta, you want to work on software that people want to use, realize that it's part of your job to make that software worth using.

But if you don't have good code, the rest is all for nothing.  ¶ 9:09 PM