Deadlines and Lifelines

As Garfield (the cat, not the president) used to say, “diet” is just “die” with a “t” on the end. Similarly, “deadline” is just… well, you get the point. Bottom line is that we’ve been slogging away on the new version of AllPeers, and after a heroic effort we completed our first integration milestone yesterday. (To protect innocent, I’m not going to say when said milestone was originally due.) Hence my nearly week-long hiatus from blogging.

The existing version of AllPeers is based on Microsoft’s development libraries and runs only on Windows. Regular readers of this blog may have guessed by now that the new AllPeers version is based on Firefox. Obviously one of the key advantages of this switch is that we will run on pratically every platform of any significance. A more subtle benefit is that we integrate more smoothly into the web browser environment. AllPeers 1.0 is a web browser embedded in a peer-to-peer client. AllPeers 2.0 will be a peer-to-peer client embedded in a web browser, and this turns out to be a far more compelling proposition.

In recent years I’ve tended to alternate every few months between two entrepreneurial pursuits: programming and begging for moneyfundraising. Software development is intensely intellectual, often frustrating but commensurately satisfying when you finally get the beast to run. Raising money involves travelling to exotic places, meeting interesting people… and trying to stiff them with the restaurant bill. So both have their appeal, but I can say without hesitation that I’ve had more fun over the past few weeks, hacking Firefox, than I have had at work for years.

I’ve therefore decided to share this enjoyment with the rest of the world. I’ll be writing regularly about the AllPeers 2.0 development process, both on a philosophical and technical level. I’ll also be augmenting Peer Pressure’s download section with some of the code that we’ve been creating. Currently in the pipeline, among other things, are XPCOM components for an XML pull parser, an XML pretty printer and a RELAX NG parser. Modern software development is all about releasing early and often, and we’re keen to jump on the bandwagon. Hopefully this code will be useful to someone, and ideally we’ll improve the quality of our product by finding out quickly what works, and what still needs work.

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1 Comment »

1. Hey, it’s a nice idea to share your code to get it tested. Not that the code would be of any use to me specifically, but I fully support your reasoning behind it. And another one - “releasing early and often” - it would be easy to argue with this one saying that in some cases people need well tested time-proven things but again - I am a notorious beta tester and just love to be an early adopter so I’m definitely with you on this one too.

   Comment by vlad — 7/15/2005 @ 9:08 am

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