Deck.js Post-mortem Quick Hits

20 October 2011

Two months ago marked the launch of deck.js, a jQuery frame­work for cre­at­ing HTML pre­sen­ta­tions. The next few days fol­lowed the same path as my last open source ven­ture: A Forrst post. Spir­ited dis­cus­sion on Hacker News. A lot of eyes. At the time of this writ­ing deck.js is the 37th most watched JavaScript project on GitHub.

The project has been and will con­tinue to be an absolute blast. Things are still young and chang­ing all the time, but here are a few of my thoughts so far:

• No going back: This was my first full-on TDD/BDD project. (Way­points tests were writ­ten post-launch.) I can­not imag­ine doing things any other way going for­ward. The ben­e­fits are immense: up-front API thrash­ing, reduc­ing unnec­es­sary MVP fea­tures, catch­ing regres­sions, pro­mot­ing mod­u­lar­ity… I could go on for days. The biggest per­ceived “con”, increased devel­op­ment time, is more than erased by the time saved as a result of the pros. A project with any degree of com­plex­ity writ­ten by authors at all con­cerned with code qual­ity will benefit.
• Between clients: I devel­oped deck.js off and on over the course of a few months, in lulls between stretches of client work. Yet another advan­tage to TDD is that it makes pick­ing up devel­op­ment eas­ier after weeks away from a project. Just fire up the tests, see what fails, and get to work. Over­all, this proved to be a great way to smooth out the nat­u­rally bumpy sched­ule that comes with free­lanc­ing. Plus build­ing a port­fo­lio of decent open-source projects leads to new clients, either directly through those libraries or as part of your over­all résumé.
• You and I are not Marco Arment: For months after Marco opened a GitHub account it sat empty, no projects, but he had hun­dreds of fol­low­ers. And for good rea­son. When you cre­ate Tum­blr and Instapa­per geeks are ready to look at any­thing you release until eter­nity. But you and I? Nobody is going to so much as peek at the source of our un-marketed projects. For three months deck.js lived on GitHub with­out any watch­ers. We can keep our project code out in the open, bro­ken, miles away from any­thing that could be called an alpha, with­out wor­ry­ing that any­body will use it let alone crit­i­cize it. So until you gar­ner the grav­i­tas of a Marco or pub­lish pub­lic doc­u­men­ta­tion and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial, don’t fret over reveal­ing your source.
• The project page is the project: If your open source thing falls any­where under the umbrella of front-end web devel­op­ment it will be judged by the project page. When deck.js launched I made the mis­take of not pro­vid­ing a print stylesheet for the home­page. Inter­net com­menters deemed deck.js unprint­able, despite the fact that the actual library included sim­pli­fied black-and-white print styles sim­i­lar to S5. This was my bad. Most peo­ple will only look at the project page and judge on that alone. It’s bet­ter to spend the time sand­ing the cor­ners of your public-facing pages than try to explain to your users that they got it all wrong.