#whatwhen

Earlier today, I was on the bus heading back from a meeting and realized something: I used to be terrified of this. No joke, when I first moved to Chicago the idea of getting on the bus freaked me out. I was convinced that I would get lost, get off at the wrong stop, or the bus would make a right turn and I'd never see home again. Silly right?

I think this happens more than we'd like to admit. We make up these exaggerated stories in our mind of what we think will happen, but rarely – if ever – does. We develop a list of things that, at the thought of trying them, makes us down right cringe. 

This got me thinking. What else makes me cringe? After a little bit of thinking, I had another cringe worthy idea from my list: open source software. Really? Yep. The thing that made me cringe about it wasn't the software itself, but rather, the act of sharing it. Giving my work away for free and leaving it open to scrutiny.

More than it being free, the criticism really spooked me. What if my code "sucks?" What if people think my work is crap? Just the though of one email saying "pack it up dude, you suck" made me shudder.

Until today. Just like the bus, I'd decided my fear was silly. I recently launched a new app called WhatWhen which is built on a new JavaScript framework called Meteor. While the community and resources are growing around the framework, there are not a lot of examples online of "full" applications. So I asked myself, "could someone else learn from this?" Am I really going to care if someone gives me a negative comment instead of helping out a fellow developer? 

No. And for a good reason: it takes stones to share your work. To put something out into the world for other people to poke and prod at, to manipulate, to tear to absolute shreds. I could see the trolls under the other side of the bridge, but I said "fuck it" and typed git push origin master. If you'd like to check it out, you can find the result over on GitHub: https://github.com/properapp/whatwhen.

Today, I'm announcing a new product: WhatWhen - Tidy timelines for freelancers.

If you've been following this blog, you'll know that I've been working on a product to manage client expectations. Today, I'm giving a preview of that work in the form of another, simpler product. 

WhatWhen was made for freelancers. It allows you to create simple, clean timelines to share with your clients. It's based on the same tool that you'll find in Proper when it launches later this summer. It's really cool and I'm excited to release it to the public.

Head over now to signup and create your first timeline.

I'm extremely open to feedback on WhatWhen, so please, if you have any thoughts, I'd be glad to chat: [email protected].