Real artists ship
Zach Waugh •
I just submitted Flint 1.0 to the Mac App Store this morning. My goal was to finish it and submit by September 1st, 2011, and it took about 6 more weeks, which isn’t too bad all things considered. It was time well spent. I got more beta testers, added a few more nice features, and fixed a lot of bugs. But still, I had more that I wanted to do. I just kept thinking about adding one more little thing, one more tweak.
Whenever I’m at that stage of a product, I think of two quotes. The first is the famous quote by Steve Jobs, which conveys so much for being so succinct. In light of Steve’s recent passing, it takes on a new urgency for me to build and create and put things out there.
"Real artists ship."
– Steve Jobs
The other that I always come back to is this tweet:
An engineer will endlessly tinker with a project as long as it's sitting in front of them. Endlessly.
— rands (@rands) October 12, 2008
If I knew Rands personally, I would have thought he wrote it about me, as I’m particularly prone to that behavior. It’s never good enough for me, there is always more to do, more features to add, more bugs to fix, it will never be finished. So it’s a question I always have to ask myself while at the end of a product, am I improving or just tinkering? If I’m tinkering, it’s time to ship.
I think I should get posters of both of those quotes and hang them above my desk.