I've been thinking more about what's next for me, regarding personal coding projects. I've been toying with an idea for much longer than some of the others I have had and acted significantly on. I've already named it in my head, and registered the domain for it years ago. So what next?

Some of my projects have been less than stellar in terms of sharing vision. I've been considering whether that is a function exclusively of my poor pre-documentation or the involvement of other developers in the project, or likely a very specific value in the range between those two. In any case, I want to work out some of what I think of as problems in the development process so that this thing can be launched as fluidly as possible.

Unlike all of the other projects I've talked about and done only a little with before giving up, I should have the requisite time for this one. I also hope to drag a couple of developers with me to get it running, perhaps a couple from previous projects, perhaps a couple from outside that sub-group of people I know. I've never mentioned this project before because it was so significant and particular that I knew I didn't have time to do it, but that's different now. So at least I hope this ends up a more significant undertaking than previous efforts.

I've had this book called "Communicating Design" sitting in my office for almost 3 years, and it gives some pretty good advice for starting into documenting the kind of project I'm thinking of building. There are chapters of the book that clearly seem like more fun than others -- the user flows and diagrams chapters seem like a lot of fun, whereas the chapter on creating test cases looks like drek -- but a complete appraisal of the project will probably yield the best fruit.

I have some ideas about license of the new project, the organization of the development community, deployment strategy, framework architecture, and some other things. These fall outside the scope of what the design book targets well. I suppose I'll just note those things as I'm documenting everything else.

It's fun starting fresh. If I can keep myself disciplined enough, it could even turn out well.