Bias towards shipping

A few weeks ago a colleague said that I had one of the stronger biases towards shipping that he had seen. I am pretty sure he meant it as a compliment, and I took it that way anyway. In my work, I am highly influenced by the Steve Jobs quote, “Real artists ship”, and I often say that our work as product developers is to ship and get better at shipping.

That being said, it’s sometimes hard for me to remember that in my personal projects. Back in January, I started an iPhone app to help me stay motivated to stick to the Paleo dietI blogged about that back then, and said:

I’ve been working on a way to do this (mostly to scratch my own itch), and will have more to say on that soon.

My plan was to ship in April. But, a trip to New Zealand and my duties at work left me with less time to devote to it. The project languished from March to about a week or two ago when I got a message from Apple that my right to the name PaleoViz would be revoked if I didn’t submit a binary.

With that kick in the pants, I went into full ship mode. Removing features, fixing bugs, finding what I hope are elegant solutions to thorny user interaction problems. The biggest decision I made in the bias to ship was to abandon having my own online photo sharing and am just using Twitter for that (for now). PaleoViz was reduced to its essence — a photo food journal app for paleo dieters.

I expect it to be approved by the end of August, if you are a paleo blogger and want a review copy, let me know.