Now that’s how it’s done

There is so much that could be said about something like http://wave.google.com.  I don’t know that I could really say much that would be profound by comparison to the thousands of posts, reviews, and other commentary that’s available.  However there is one quick point I want to identify.  The unique thing to me about Wave, is not all the neat things that you can do with it, but more to the point…How it was designed.  Basically Google wave encompasses the realization of a team not saying “what can we do with what we have”, but more accurately “what do we need to be able to do”.  Computers are are slowly moving toward that world; where the designers are finally realizing that the computer is a tool we should shape to meet our needs rather than adapting our behavior to work with the tool.  This is the kind of thinking that really inspires me, and yet at the same time can often make me feel sheepish.  It’s that kind of inspired thinking that’s truly impressive.  Design for hat’s needed, and not just what’s the easy way to do something.  Sometimes, it really is worth doing the “right” thing; time to market becomes less important if your competitor’s tools are profoundly superior and redesigning to keep up is often even harder than doing it right the first time.

Building a Foundation

After several iterations through various CMS solutions, I thought I’d found a solid base with Joomla!, but decided that it was likely overkill for this site.  From there I also installed drupal and MoveableType. They all seemed a bit heavy by comparison, and likely just way more than I needed.  Part of it was likely the classic mistake of looking for the solution before identifying the problem set.  Once I realized that this site is very likely going to be nothing more than a glorified blog it made my expectations much more clear.

I haven’t gotten a chance to put it fully to the test, but worst case I can work around any issues I think I might encounter; or better yet, maybe cook up a solution I could share with others.  In the mean time I hope that this gives me a chance to really start rolling with the idea.  I don’t do a lot of work in my day job that would be acceptable to share publicly per se, but I definitely have some inspirations for smaller projects and other items that I’d like to try to revive and share.

Be advised, warned even, I am likely going to take time here to also share some of my insights in the general world of the computer industry at large.  As my own path grows and changes I’m finding worlds opening in front of me, and I’d like to share some of my own experiences from the trenches.