OPML editor progress in a thunderstorm
“A hugely dramatic thunderstorm godcast, with an update on progress with the OPML editor, and a roadmap through next week and beyond. Only 11 minutes. Pretty cool!”
Dave Winer was coding at his computer when a severe thunderstorm started outside, with large thunderbolts shaking the house. Despite the distractions, Dave continues working on releasing a new outliner tool, which a small initial test group of users had been trying out and providing feedback on. Dave explain that he is not aiming for perfection, but rather wants to fix the major “deal stopper” issues that would prevent users from being able to effectively use the tool. He plans to continue iterating on the outliner and then build additional outline-based applications like a blogging tool, in order to attract more developers to contribute to the project and build a community around the platform.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Good morning everybody, it’s
Dave Winer and today is June
15, 2005 and I was sitting
at my computer coding away, fur
iously solving problems, fixing
bugs, creating new bugs and
whatever.
And all of a sudden it starts raining outside and there’s thunder strikes and earth shaking thunderbolts.
And at first I said I don’t have time and then a couple more and they’re getting like huge, huge, huge thunderbolts and I said I have an obligation here, here’s another one coming.
You ready? Now it was out over the ocean, the cool thing about a thunderstorm that’s out over the ocean when you have a view of the ocean is that you can tell when you’re about to get a big thing happening.
So this is the third thunderstorm podcast, oh there ’s another one, that one was due east, I was about to say, it’s really , really hot today, my internet was down, first thing this morning I totally couldn’t get on and so I ended up going to Starbucks and it was too noisy and there were flies there and I just couldn’t concentrate, I had like things I needed to do, programming stuff I needed to do and I just couldn’t concentrate so and I picked up and I went to the public library and they have really great Wi-Fi access there and it’s free and I got a bunch of stuff done there but then school let out and the kids started coming in and well they ’re really, really cute and they come up and talk to you and they really like the library, I sort of forgot about how much kids like libraries but it made it really hard to concentrate and then I was going in and out of a car and at one point I looked at the thermometer, it was 105 degrees and of course there’s another strike and of course it was 100 % humidity and so like all day, wow, on you can feel the house shake, you can’t feel it, I’m saying but so all day long it’s like what’s happening is it’s cooking up a great thunderstorm, a really, really great thunderstorm and so now we’re reaping the benefit of it and this makes the earlier thunderstorms look like a triple strike, here we go, now not so big but that one went, blip, bl ip, blip, three different lighting bolts all happening at the same time and at the same spot actually but not the great big thunderbolt I was expecting and of course all the while it ’s just totally pouring rain and I got a little movie of the , oh wow, that one was really goddamn close, we ought to do the math on this, somebody ought to figure out how close that one was, you can of course figure that one out and take the speed of sound from the moment at which I exclaimed to the moment that you actually heard the damn thing, whoo, I wonder how loud that’s going to sound, I hope it sounds great, anyway so yeah we’re getting ready to release the outliner, the to-do list is getting short and the initial test group, I guess there are like what, seven or eight people, I don’t know if I can remember all of the people, it’s like Dave Luber, Roger’s Cadenhead, Casso, Stan Crute, Andrew Grumit, Lawrence Lee, Andre Radka, I’m probably leaving somebody out but yeah so they all seem to be using it, not well I won’t say all but we’re getting pretty good participation today and that’s a pretty good sign and now people are starting to report the kind of problems like Dave Luber reported today, he said this is something that’s just going to drive the first, holy fuck, that sent people running, there were people enjoying the thunderstorm, that sent them running, that one, that one was a block away, that one was right down the street, so anyway Dave was reporting a problem, he said this is just going to drive the first users crazy and I said well great let’s fix it, those are exactly the kinds of things we want to fix because and then of course the hope is that we’re getting you know what I want from the next round of beta testers do exactly the same thing, I don’t want to know where the nitty little display bugs are, the ones that you’ll see you know once every couple of days or whatever, I can’t do anything about those things, I literally can’t do it, I can’t go in to the C code and change the way the outliner performs but what I wanted but I do know that the outliner is usable, I’ve been using this outliner for like 17 years, so it’s usable, I’ve written tons of code with it, I’ve written every scripting news that’s ever been written, all the Dave Nets were written, well I don’t say all, I think I wrote, the first ones I think I wrote with more, that’s scary, dear god, help, this is what we called in the first undercast, we called this a Godcast, I called it a Godcast because I felt like my partner on this podcast was God, okay, anyway so you keep wanting to refine those, you know, get rid of the deal stoppers, things that prevent people from getting worked up, that’s what you want to get rid of, one at a time, barrier after barrier comes down, you know, and to the point where, I mean I know you can get worked up with this right now, I know because we are getting worked up a bit, and I have been getting worked up with the outliner, but I want more and more people to do it, and then what I want to do is I want to attract developers, I want the kind of developers to come when there are lots of users, okay, and I want them to listen to the users and I want them to be users, and I want the software just to attract the good developers who really like to produce software for users, and that’s kind of what, then once we have that, then I feel like, okay, that’s, I’ve attained success here, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I’m trying to do, so, you know, I don’t want the kind of bug reports that, like, aim for perfection, because I know I’m not getting the perfection, and I don’t have the patience to get the perfection, I know that I could try to get perfection and I would never get there, I could try to get it a lot better than it is, and I would just never ship, it would never happen, so I’m going to ship for sure, but we’re just going to keep trying to take care of the problems, and then of course, I consider this a platform for outline-based applications, and I’ve got a bunch more that I know how to do, like, I want to do a blogging tool for this, a really simple, you know, outliner-based blogging tool, not built on the MetaWebLight, not built on the MetaWebLight API, and not built to work with , you know, the existing blog ging tools, although we know that that’s totally doable, that’s been done in fact, I think I heard Andrew Grumit talk about that, Andrew has made an outliner that works with mov able type out of this codebase, and so maybe Andrew will, you know, release that application, you know, there’s all kinds of stuff that’s possible and well-known how to do that, but I’m going to do, like, an outliner that’s just, I mean, a podcaster, let’s get this right , a blogging tool is just designed to work with an out liner, and a simpler blogging API that, you know, blogging API that works with that, and, you know, a lot of reasons for doing that , I mean, basically, you know, the developer community hasn’t wanted to, like, unify and co alesce, they wanted to blow everything apart, so, you know, I’m not going to fight with them on that one, I’m just going to start something new, and learn from what happened in the last, the communities, and then try to make it work out a little bit better this time, so , anyhow, Thunderstorm shows no signs of abating, but I do need to get back to work, and God has provided us with a very entertaining backdrop for a podcast, and a rather hell-raising backdrop for a podcast, and so, there you have it, that’s today, June 15, 2005 , and this is Morning Coffee Notes, www. morningcoffee notes. com, and I’m Dave Winer, and my blog is www. scripting.
com, and that’s where you should tune into for news about the editor that I’m talking about, and all the, you know, latest, juicy tidbits, and from that, if you’re going to be at Nome Dex, here comes another one, if you’re going to be at Nome Dex, I look forward to seeing you, that’s just like next week , so, that’ll be cool, anyway, that’s it for today, I’m going to talk to you again real soon, bye.
, and I’ll see you in the next one, bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And all of a sudden it starts raining outside and there’s thunder strikes and earth shaking thunderbolts.
And at first I said I don’t have time and then a couple more and they’re getting like huge, huge, huge thunderbolts and I said I have an obligation here, here’s another one coming.
You ready? Now it was out over the ocean, the cool thing about a thunderstorm that’s out over the ocean when you have a view of the ocean is that you can tell when you’re about to get a big thing happening.
So this is the third thunderstorm podcast, oh there ’s another one, that one was due east, I was about to say, it’s really , really hot today, my internet was down, first thing this morning I totally couldn’t get on and so I ended up going to Starbucks and it was too noisy and there were flies there and I just couldn’t concentrate, I had like things I needed to do, programming stuff I needed to do and I just couldn’t concentrate so and I picked up and I went to the public library and they have really great Wi-Fi access there and it’s free and I got a bunch of stuff done there but then school let out and the kids started coming in and well they ’re really, really cute and they come up and talk to you and they really like the library, I sort of forgot about how much kids like libraries but it made it really hard to concentrate and then I was going in and out of a car and at one point I looked at the thermometer, it was 105 degrees and of course there’s another strike and of course it was 100 % humidity and so like all day, wow, on you can feel the house shake, you can’t feel it, I’m saying but so all day long it’s like what’s happening is it’s cooking up a great thunderstorm, a really, really great thunderstorm and so now we’re reaping the benefit of it and this makes the earlier thunderstorms look like a triple strike, here we go, now not so big but that one went, blip, bl ip, blip, three different lighting bolts all happening at the same time and at the same spot actually but not the great big thunderbolt I was expecting and of course all the while it ’s just totally pouring rain and I got a little movie of the , oh wow, that one was really goddamn close, we ought to do the math on this, somebody ought to figure out how close that one was, you can of course figure that one out and take the speed of sound from the moment at which I exclaimed to the moment that you actually heard the damn thing, whoo, I wonder how loud that’s going to sound, I hope it sounds great, anyway so yeah we’re getting ready to release the outliner, the to-do list is getting short and the initial test group, I guess there are like what, seven or eight people, I don’t know if I can remember all of the people, it’s like Dave Luber, Roger’s Cadenhead, Casso, Stan Crute, Andrew Grumit, Lawrence Lee, Andre Radka, I’m probably leaving somebody out but yeah so they all seem to be using it, not well I won’t say all but we’re getting pretty good participation today and that’s a pretty good sign and now people are starting to report the kind of problems like Dave Luber reported today, he said this is something that’s just going to drive the first, holy fuck, that sent people running, there were people enjoying the thunderstorm, that sent them running, that one, that one was a block away, that one was right down the street, so anyway Dave was reporting a problem, he said this is just going to drive the first users crazy and I said well great let’s fix it, those are exactly the kinds of things we want to fix because and then of course the hope is that we’re getting you know what I want from the next round of beta testers do exactly the same thing, I don’t want to know where the nitty little display bugs are, the ones that you’ll see you know once every couple of days or whatever, I can’t do anything about those things, I literally can’t do it, I can’t go in to the C code and change the way the outliner performs but what I wanted but I do know that the outliner is usable, I’ve been using this outliner for like 17 years, so it’s usable, I’ve written tons of code with it, I’ve written every scripting news that’s ever been written, all the Dave Nets were written, well I don’t say all, I think I wrote, the first ones I think I wrote with more, that’s scary, dear god, help, this is what we called in the first undercast, we called this a Godcast, I called it a Godcast because I felt like my partner on this podcast was God, okay, anyway so you keep wanting to refine those, you know, get rid of the deal stoppers, things that prevent people from getting worked up, that’s what you want to get rid of, one at a time, barrier after barrier comes down, you know, and to the point where, I mean I know you can get worked up with this right now, I know because we are getting worked up a bit, and I have been getting worked up with the outliner, but I want more and more people to do it, and then what I want to do is I want to attract developers, I want the kind of developers to come when there are lots of users, okay, and I want them to listen to the users and I want them to be users, and I want the software just to attract the good developers who really like to produce software for users, and that’s kind of what, then once we have that, then I feel like, okay, that’s, I’ve attained success here, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I’m trying to do, so, you know, I don’t want the kind of bug reports that, like, aim for perfection, because I know I’m not getting the perfection, and I don’t have the patience to get the perfection, I know that I could try to get perfection and I would never get there, I could try to get it a lot better than it is, and I would just never ship, it would never happen, so I’m going to ship for sure, but we’re just going to keep trying to take care of the problems, and then of course, I consider this a platform for outline-based applications, and I’ve got a bunch more that I know how to do, like, I want to do a blogging tool for this, a really simple, you know, outliner-based blogging tool, not built on the MetaWebLight, not built on the MetaWebLight API, and not built to work with , you know, the existing blog ging tools, although we know that that’s totally doable, that’s been done in fact, I think I heard Andrew Grumit talk about that, Andrew has made an outliner that works with mov able type out of this codebase, and so maybe Andrew will, you know, release that application, you know, there’s all kinds of stuff that’s possible and well-known how to do that, but I’m going to do, like, an outliner that’s just, I mean, a podcaster, let’s get this right , a blogging tool is just designed to work with an out liner, and a simpler blogging API that, you know, blogging API that works with that, and, you know, a lot of reasons for doing that , I mean, basically, you know, the developer community hasn’t wanted to, like, unify and co alesce, they wanted to blow everything apart, so, you know, I’m not going to fight with them on that one, I’m just going to start something new, and learn from what happened in the last, the communities, and then try to make it work out a little bit better this time, so , anyhow, Thunderstorm shows no signs of abating, but I do need to get back to work, and God has provided us with a very entertaining backdrop for a podcast, and a rather hell-raising backdrop for a podcast, and so, there you have it, that’s today, June 15, 2005 , and this is Morning Coffee Notes, www. morningcoffee notes. com, and I’m Dave Winer, and my blog is www. scripting.
com, and that’s where you should tune into for news about the editor that I’m talking about, and all the, you know, latest, juicy tidbits, and from that, if you’re going to be at Nome Dex, here comes another one, if you’re going to be at Nome Dex, I look forward to seeing you, that’s just like next week , so, that’ll be cool, anyway, that’s it for today, I’m going to talk to you again real soon, bye.
, and I’ll see you in the next one, bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]