2011-10-20-deck-js-post-mortem-quick-hits.html

---
layout: post
title: Deck.js Post-mortem Quick Hits
tldr: TDD is great. Write OSS between clients. Nobody cares about your code. Be judged by your project page.
---

<p>Two months ago marked the launch of <a href="http://imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js">deck.js</a>, a jQuery frame­work for cre­at­ing <span class="caps">HTML</span> pre­sen­ta­tions. The next few days fol­lowed the same path as my <a href="http://imakewebthings.com/blog/jquery-waypoints">last open source ven­ture</a>: A <a href="http://forrst.com/posts/deck_js-N8l">Forrst post</a>. Spir­ited dis­cus­sion on <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916352">Hacker News</a>. A lot of eyes. At the time of this writ­ing deck.js is the 37th most watched JavaScript project on GitHub.</p>

<p>The project has been and will con­tinue to be an absolute blast. Things are still young and chang­ing all the time, but here are a few of my thoughts so far:</p>

<ul>
    <li><strong>No going back</strong>: This was my first full-on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development"><span class="caps">TDD</span>/<span class="caps">BDD</span></a> project. (Way­points tests were writ­ten post-launch.) I can­not imag­ine doing things any other way going for­ward. The ben­e­fits are immense: up-front <span class="caps">API</span> thrash­ing, reduc­ing unnec­es­sary <span class="caps">MVP</span> fea­tures, catch­ing regres­sions, pro­mot­ing mod­u­lar­ity… I could go on for days. The biggest per­ceived “con”, increased devel­op­ment time, is more than erased by the time saved as a result of the pros. A project with any degree of com­plex­ity writ­ten by authors at all con­cerned with code qual­ity will benefit.</li>

    <li><strong>Between clients</strong>: I devel­oped deck.js off and on over the course of a few months, in lulls between stretches of client work. Yet another advan­tage to <span class="caps">TDD</span> is that it makes pick­ing up devel­op­ment eas­ier after weeks away from a project. Just fire up the tests, see what fails, and get to work. Over­all, this proved to be a great way to smooth out the nat­u­rally bumpy sched­ule that comes with free­lanc­ing. Plus build­ing a port­fo­lio of decent open-source projects leads to new clients, either directly through those libraries or as part of your over­all résumé.</li>

    <li><strong>You and I are not Marco Arment</strong>: For months after <a href="http://marco.org">Marco</a> opened a GitHub account it sat empty, no projects, but he had hun­dreds of fol­low­ers. <em>And for good rea­son</em>. When you cre­ate <a href="http://www.tumblr.com">Tum­blr</a> and <a href="http://www.instapaper.com">Instapa­per</a> geeks are ready to look at any­thing you release until eter­nity. But you and I? Nobody is going to so much as peek at the source of our un-marketed projects. For three months deck.js lived on GitHub with­out any watch­ers. We can keep our project code out in the open, bro­ken, miles away from any­thing that could be called an alpha, with­out wor­ry­ing that any­body will use it let alone crit­i­cize it. So until you gar­ner the grav­i­tas of a Marco or pub­lish pub­lic doc­u­men­ta­tion and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial, don’t fret over reveal­ing your source.</li>

    <li><strong>The project page is the project</strong>: If your open source thing falls any­where under the umbrella of front-end web devel­op­ment it will be judged by the project page. When deck.js launched I made the mis­take of not pro­vid­ing a print stylesheet for the <a href="http://imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js">home­page</a>. Inter­net com­menters deemed deck.js unprint­able, despite the fact that the actual library included sim­pli­fied black-and-white print styles sim­i­lar to <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/"><span class="caps">S5</span></a>. This was my bad. Most peo­ple will only look at the project page and judge on that alone. It’s bet­ter to spend the time sand­ing the cor­ners of your public-facing pages than try to explain to your users that they got it all wrong.</li>
</ul>