In 4 days it will have been a month since this project was “started”. Now I don’t mean to sound pushy, nor do I want to rush things. I just want to know, when is the deliberation phase going to end? There’s been some really good discussion, and lots of good ideas have been thrown around, but do we need to set a deadline for when we “break ground” and start the foundation?
Assuming we take another week to finish discussing what we are going to make, and then another month to document a super bare bones framework (I’m being generous here), could we hopefully “write the first line of code” before the end of the year?
I guess what I’m getting at is, what time scales do you all have in mind? We talked on the discord informally about when we expect to have our first deliverable, but that was quite a while ago and it did not include everyone’s opinion.
TL;DR: What is our time to market?
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This is closely related to this other post: What's our WAG on a timeframe for MVP?
I will provide additional commentary:
(…) As I posted on #project-management earlier (https://discordapp.com/channels/634104110131445811/637322644718616576/638860430567276559), on the technical side I believe we need to design the architectural model, the DB structure, define code conventions, contributing model and license in order to work in actual software development in an organized fashion.
– me, 2019-10-30
(…) let’s get the requirements documented and agreed upon, then let’s figure out exactly how the project will be structured.
– also me, 2019-11-08
(…) The rough estimate I gave (…) looks reasonable. It means that we still won’t be touching code on the main repo(s) for at least another 30 - 40 days. Possibly a bit more.
(…)
you must have noticed how/why these things take time
(…)
I think I’ll try to reach out to Monica and encourage her to place a call for contributors to actively help with documenting the requirements (we got plenty of good proposals and ideas on Discord!)
– still me, 2019-11-12
The answer to the title alone would be “we have already started”, but I get what you mean. Moving on, no need for hard deadlines, IMO. Things have been going more or less according to reasonable expectations.
I do feel we are pretty close to reaching agreement w.r.t. defining the product. Quite possibly within the next 6-10 days. Then, we’ll be documenting and planning. This takes more time. I suspect it can be done in under 3 weeks, but that depends on members’ engagement, and you know - people are volunteering their free time and it’s the end of the year, so we can’t push anything really. We’ll see.
Thus, my updated “reasonably optimistic” estimate as of today: by Wednesday, 2019-12-18, it is possible that we will be writing some code. Passing that, it is very likely that we’ll have to wait “until next year”(aha!).
Now, this is unfortunately still true.
Oh, and by the way:
It is a month TODAY! 
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Here is one additional quote (you guessed it, by me - 2019-10-30):
Our most experienced programmers all agree that it’s much easier to throw some code together to do stuff, than it is to develop a solution that will still function well (and be maintenable) for years to come.
@Cerbrus even said in #ideas (pinned): “On a project of this scale, you figure out requirements before you start programming”.
There’s a saying that goes: “failing to plan is planning to fail”. I don’t take that to an extreme, but generally, it’s true.
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We’ll be able to reach the 12/18 goal if we can reach conclusions from some of our MVP threads that have been open the longest, since most of them are starting to reach a conclusion.
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