So I recently launched Your Workflow which was inspired a few months ago by @dennis_j_bell.

As with all personal projects the ideas sit in your head for a while taking shape. Since personal projects don’t always really pay the bills it’s easy to get them sidetracked which means they’d never actually get done. But if it’s something you really want to do you eventually set a due date announce it then work to hit it.

The Timeline

For me the it ended up being a 2 week turn around from formal announcement to actually launching. As I came up to the week before I got lots of extra client work which is awesome because I like my house and I like to eat, unfortunately this also left me with a bunch of to do items on the site that just weren’t going to fit inside the time I had left.

The Evaluation

With time a ticking away (points if you know the song reference) I was faced with a decision about which features would actually make it into the site. The two things that had to be in it were, a working WordPress theme, and the first audio show. Since I had both of those things already I decided that launching on time was the way to go.

Sure the first audio show is a bit rough around the edges, it doesn’t have intro music and cuts out abruptly but it’s there to listen to.

The Cuts

Some of the cuts ended up being the site advertising. I’d like Your Workflow to make some money so that I can justify running it long-term but to launch the site I can skip the adds.

I also wanted to set up a good deployment strategy. No more of this FTP changes crap. Lets leverage the power of the terminal and Git and get deployments streamlined. Well that got cut to. Sure it saves me time but it’s not needed to launch a site.

Probably the final thing I cut that was of some importance was the show images. The first show didn’t have an image when I launched it. Sure it has one now but again the reality is that it didn’t need an image to actually launch so it got cut.

The Blessing of Deadlines

The reality is that setting aggressive deadlines is awesome to help you prioritize the things that are actually important in your project. I highly advise setting aggressive deadlines to force yourself to trim the fat and just put out what you need. You can always iterate the project later.

The day after the launch of Your Workflow I push code changes 3 times. I’ve push 3 code over the weekend and setup a pretty solid deployment strategy that leverages the git enabled web sever the site runs on. Now I’m fleshing out the things that are nice to have.