Jobster Pilot Launch

Tonight, Jobster launched the pilot version (don’t call it a beta –marketing) of its forthcoming service. And so tonight I’d thought I’d kick off the inaugural post to my blog. I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in my 7 months at Jobster. I’ve never seen a software project I’ve worked on, especially one where I’ve had as much influence as I’ve had at Jobster, ship (even in this limited capacity) in such a short amount of time. We kicked out roughly 35,000 lines of code, and most of it seems to work like we intended.

That’s pretty damn cool.

I demo’d the pilot for some friends tonight. One’s a teacher at Issaquah High School, the other’s a nurse. They both complain about the software they use for their work, about how hard it is to use. But they seemed pretty impressed with demo I gave them and noted how they thought the target audience may find it compelling, even inviting, to use. I don’t know, maybe they were just being nice.

So why blog about this? Why blog about anything? I blame my CEO. He’s a great guy, but he’s kinda goofy. He makes us create these lists of individual quarterly goals. We need to put down 10 (give or take a couple) things in a list we intend to accomplish for the next quarter. Most of us actually publish this list on our internal Confluence wiki. There’s actually a bit of pressure around this stuff; he gives out prizes to those that achieve the goals they set out to accomplish. One of my personal goals was to write a blog, partly because our software revolves around social networking (what software doesn’t these days?) and blogs are currently one of the great examples of loosely-structured social networks. But also partly because I’m really excited about the software we are writing and the tools we get to use, and I want to share my experiences like others are doing in their blogs. Hopefully this forum will allow me to do just that over the next few weeks/months/…

But writing a blog scares me. Just like shipping software scares me. In both cases, I’m putting forth my thoughts, my work out for public viewing. What if it sucks? What if I use “it’s” when I should use “its”? What if the feature I’m most proud of brings the site to a null pointer-induced halt? What if no one reads my blog, or worse, I’m read and ridiculed? What if no one uses our product, or worse, it’s used and found wanting?

I guess I hate feeling vulnerable. But there’s little chance of success if you don’t step outside your comfort zone and try something new. So here goes nothing…

Godspeed, Jobster Pilot. May you blossom into a full-featured, bug free, highly scalable V1.