#peddly

[crankybutthead]

Old Book 1 Page 51

[crankybutthead]

Old Book 1 Page 46

[drewdagostino]

Ugly... one step on the road to beautiful? (Peddley diary #1)

For the past month and half, I've been building a new thing. It's called Peddley - the result of 1) my belief that the future of the Internet is in real-time shared experiences, 2) this nagging desire to stretch out my design skills, and 3) a whole bunch of caffeine. It's a virtual auction house (check it out here).

It's almost to the point of being ready to release out into the wild, but I first I needed to do some testing to make sure the thing worked...

And, um, it didn't. After giving a demo to 10 willing friends at the same time, I had what we'll call a humbling moment. Even though I definitely was aware I still had some work left on my plate, I totally wasn't expecting the total breakdown that rendered the thing unusable. I guess this is what keeps engineers up all night. "Buggy" would be a very gentle way of describing it. But you know what? I'm not mad. Not even really that frustrated. It's kind of exciting. My little untested prototype had interaction with other humans for the first time ever, and although it couldn't handle all the pressure, it didn't die. Even though it was quite ugly, it's living, breathing, and the few people that were using it for the brief time it kind-of-worked were actually interested in the concept. Furthermore, I caught a brief glimpse into the real life users that I hope will be interacting with Peddley in the near future, and it broke a lot of my assumptions. False assumptions can be deadly to build something on top of. Is it embarrassing to put a product out there that is still pretty ugly? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely.