Shooting for Alpha
Project icecream is coming along pretty well. I did my first proof-of-concept demo to someone and she thought I had something good. My next target date is Memorial Day weekend when I plan on demo-ing icecream to another, bigger, group of friends. After that, I'm shooting for Fourth-of-July closed beta test with a target demographic. I'm pretty stoked. As for Ruby and Rails, I'm just going to skip it for now. I'm finding everything I need so far with Django. The biggest potential issue I had was with user authentication and registration, but I've found some good resources for setting it up so that I don't need to re-invent everything. (James Bennett's b-list blog is particularly helpful. I will likely use his Django registration package, kept in bitbucket.) And all practical considerations aside, the recent Ruby-Porngate drama just makes me glad I went the Python route. Speaking of community resources, it's obvious that I am racking up quite a debt to the open source community in general and to the Django community in particular. I plan on contributing back to these as soon as I have my product up and running.
