SHDH6 wrap up and my crap.

Continuing in the "wow, it's the same, but different!" trend of the SuperHappyDevHouse events I attend, last night's (this morning's?) SHDH was different from the rest. The first one was very much a par-tay, and tons of fun. The second one was awkward and uncomfortable, as I was recovering from personal conflict at the time, and trying to make sure Kris was enjoying himself (while he didn't want to be there).

This one was very much what I wanted all of them to be: an evening of devlopment. Kris and I listened to the early presentations (Jeff on Vantage, Jesse on writing Firefox extensions (using XUL) (and again with a brief introduction to Ruby on Rails), and Kevin Burton on feed parsing (in reverse order). Then, we dashed off to work on myCrap.

For years, I've been asking Kris to work on a web project with me. He has always been willing, and asked, "okay, what do you want me to do?" but we've struggled with finding a project we're both interested in doing.

myCrap solves this dilemma well, because it's a combination of the freecycle site I've been wanting to write for a long time, and web-lend, a site that Bharat did a long time ago (6 years?) to handle books and videos he's loaned to friends. We're scratching the "Where is Disc 1?" "I don't know. Who did you loan it to?" "I don't remember." itch with this site.

There will be nominally two sites: http://take.mycrap.org/ for the former give-away functionality, and http://borrow.mycrap.org/ for the latter loan part. We'll be using flickr for image management, and tags for category control. Amazon will be used to look up items via the ISBN and UPC symbol. And, in the spirit of all new sites, we'll have FOAF, trust/feedback/rating user networks.

Did I mention we're launching all of this on the first of the year?

Probably not.

Everyone I've mentioned this project to has been excited about it and the potential to help people manage stuff (their crap!). That Kris is excited to be working on a project with me has me jazzed, too.

The downside is getting Kris up to speed on my preferred community website application platform. I hadn't realized how hard creating basic functionality in a Drupal module is, having been doing it for years now. Working with Kris was a serious eye-opener. Need to get groundr off the ground sooner than later to make that much easier.

The jokes with the site are fun, though. We're definitely not going to take ourselves seriously on this. The site is going to be all crap. "What are you working on?" "Mycrap." "Oh, well, can we work on my crap instead?" "Uh, I am." "Oh."