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by lifeisstillgood
4619 days ago
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A meta question if you will - I have often come across situations in work where "if only we had that tool". sometimes I have hacked something together, other times taken it further and tidied it up and released it. But this seems to have a large level of polish so ... When did you realise the need for surf Did you work on it as a main project at some point or is it a side project When and how did you decide to commit to getting this done and the big one for me - tools are driven by a need, but often the need keeps coming while the time to build it diminishes. What strategies did you use to keep the plates spinning while building surf? I think we can all mostly answer the questions - I just waant to know how different your answers are from say mine when I don't release two major OSS projects and you do. cheers |
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I want to mention the "polish": I personally don't believe in releasing an open source project without polish. If it is missing docs, its just not complete. If it is ugly, it is not complete. The technical aspects of Serf were done weeks ago. Getting the human side of things done took another few weeks (contracting designers and such).
> When did you realise the need for serf?
The need for something like Serf has existed since I started doing ops. Every time I hit something where I say to myself "why is this so hard/crappy" is when I write it down in my notebook for a future date. I then just think on the idea for awhile and eventually when I feel like I have a significantly better solution than what is out there already, I build it.
I decided to start building Serf when @armon started throwing gossip protocol academic papers at me. I realized he figured it out, this was clearly significantly better, so we started working on it.
> Did you work on it as a main project at some point or is it a side project?
To get it out the door we focus on it for some period of time. After it is shipped it is still what I would consider a "main project" but time is split between various projects.
> When and how did you decide to commit to getting this done?
A few weeks ago. It took about a month to build. Building it is easy. Figuring out WHAT to build... took a long time. I have to say I've had "service orchestration/membership" in my notebook for years.
> What strategies did you use to keep the plates spinning while building surf?
No good answer here, we just prioritize some things over others. Serf was our top priority this month.