
Treat it as finished - joelg87
http://joel.is/post/4308658019/treat-it-as-finished
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zdw
It's finished when you have a disaster and recovery plan. If you don't have
everything being backed up in some way, you're just running programs and
waiting for them to die, or for accidental mistakes to be made and data to be
lost.

At the beginning, this can be simple as a 3 or 4 line script that compresses
all your files, dumps the database, and copies it offsite, which you run on a
daily/hourly basis.

~~~
kabdib
Seriously, if you're not running backups and testing them, you're not done.
It's unbelievably cheap insurance.

We started doing informal "keep this in each of our houses" off-site backups
on simple burned discs from our first week, and bi-weekly dumps to Iron
Mountain a few months later.

Spend some time making sure the backups actually work. We found errors in our
source repository that we had to write tools to fix, but since we budgeted
some time, it wasn't a big deal.

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feelin_tired
Joel, great post

I think we are all a little afraid of saying "it's finished" because we have
no comeback when someone says "it sucks". I guess its that fear of rejection,
whereas if we say its unfinished we can always claim the "yup we know, and the
next release will be better".

Surely this is why the fad of slapping a Beta sign all over the products
started, just to let people know that "it has some bugs an we know about them"
What we really wanted to say was "It has some bugs, which we have no clue
about, and we want you to help us discover them" :-)

As for the blogs, I agree, way too many , and any review is a good review.

Iqbal

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RaphaelleHeaf
It's about creating something simple but decent for V0.1 - then letting your
customer's metrics guide you on how to improve it

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otaku_coder
Great article Joel. It is hard to get into that way of thinking when you're
being a perfectionist over things, but you're right. Getting validation early
and often will drive your featureset and refinements going forward.

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ntmartin
Good post Joel. It's really hard to have that mindset, but I think you're
right. Promote and gain traction, then refine.

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AshMokhberi
Great post. Don't just ship early, promote early.

