Chris Olsen

Tonight I was working away at a Tim Horton’s, since it is a change from my normal working space (their coffee is really not very good), when I get a message on my cell phone from a friend. The message read “Uh-oh, you’re in trouble”, followed by a link. It has been quite a while since I felt that sick that fast.

A site that I created a couple days ago was on the front page of wilbit.com and not in a good way. The reason was a simple one, I just violated the 11th commandment.

I created a small app (~8-10 hours of work) to allow me to track my spending since tax time coming up and who wants to use a spreadsheet to enter data where a web application could do the same thing. So, of course, that is what I have to do.

I have this issue with creating apps that I can’t do it with no styles, it seems to through my focus out the door. I like to have things looking nice while creating. I didn’t feel like designing something since it would have doubled the time required on the app so I copied the beanstalk app layout.

After inserting some of my transactions I figured before I wasted too much time I should just make it a public app, because maybe, just maybe there is someone else out there that would use it, and after all I have a extremely slow site5 account that I already paid for a year upfront that I am not using, so why not. So I added the ability to create an account, made a couple of quick fixes and deployed.

I guess I didn’t put myself in the other person’s shoes to whom I copied from and I really really apologize for it. Sometimes when you get the deployment rush, even for small apps like this, your primary goal is to get it up on the sever and you lose sight of other important things.

The worst thing is that I only told three people about the app, two friends and my mom. Oh, the humiliation.

I wish I would’ve checked my email earlier and took care of things before the blog post was made, but that is a lesson to me in trying to manage my time better my keeping my email turned off while I am working.

Once again my apologies to Chris Nagle* and the team at Wildbit.

*Owns and operates Wilbit, that has created Beanstalk. Beanstalk is a really good app for keeping your projects on, and highly recommend it to anyone that hasn’t caught the Git bug that is going around.