Today was a big day in my life as a developer.  I added the most important feature to my application.  This is the first time I have ever added a feature of such magnitude to an application I wrote as a side project.  You might be wondering what this wonderful feature of which I speak?

SHIPPING!!!

Did it really need to be in bold, with 3 exclamation points?  Yes, I think it did.  This is a huge accomplishment on a personal level.  I have started and not finished at least a dozen other projects in my life.  The all start out the same way.  I think “Hey, this technology is really cool, I should build something.”  I find an idea and after I’ve fully explored the technology, I never finish the last 20% of the project.  You know the 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

I always learn a lot from these side projects, but this is the first time I’ll really have something to show for it.  Am I proud of the code?  Absolutely not.  I was working with an open source chess engine (from ChessBin.com) to setup the board and validate moves.  I had to do some things that made me cringe at times to get things working.  The alternative was to spend weeks refactoring the chess engine with the hope of not breaking it while converting it from something designed for WinForms to something designed for MVVM.  I chose the shortcut so that I could add other features, like shipping.

Is my app going to change the world?  Is it going to make me rich?  Absolutely not.  I expect to get dozens of downloads per year, and hope to make back the $99 I paid to publish it over my lifetime.

Will I try to publish another loss producing app in the future?  Yes.  This whole thing has been a great learning experience, both development and product management wise.  I’m sure I’ll learn a lot about marketing in the coming months as well.

If you have a Windows Phone please check it out.  If like it give me a nice 5 star rating.  If you don’t like it send me an email and tell me what you’d do differently.