With an average of less than 5 days a month we could spend on our little projects in 2009, we achieved more than we expected one year ago, but also less. What started out as a small project to be able to draw UML diagrams on webpages, has turned out into a whole development stack (ProtoJS, ADL, Canvas2D, UmlCanvas), a UML hosting service and a complete collaboration platform on the drawing board. On the other hand we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we originally embarked on. TheModelFactory, is slowly growing and attracting more and more attention around the blog- and tweetosphere, but we must admit that it is nowhere close to the dream of about one year ago.
But there is a lot of truth in the saying “You win some, you postpone some”. We already discussed the fact that we have been focussing too much on the underlying foundations and too little on the actual goals we set forth. But this has proven to be a big win in the end. Today we know that TheModelFactory and our Hosted UmlCanvas must go hand in hand to create an incredible interesting online UML experience. Without the experiments and the many excursions, we would never have seen this and would have been focussing on a static wiki, not leveraging the power of Web 2.0 (end-of-buzzword-marketing-mumbo-jumbo).
But there is another downside to this situation: When you climb up one mountain, you end up looking at higher mountains. We climbed this mountain in 2009 in roughly 100 man days. We simply cannot afford to take another 200 and 2 years to realize all these goodies. We need to speed up our development and we need to do it now. If we cannot produce a decently working version of this platform in say 2 months, we should stop and leave it to others. It’s not about being able to capitalize on it, before someone else does, it’s about being able to produce and sustain a product in reasonable time. We cannot provide a service to end-users at this pace, that would not be realistic.
And so, on month ago, I decided to take (at least) 2 months of vacation (in between clients), to dedicate some quality-day-time to all this. The goal is to have by that time a platform up and running, that meets our current vision, that is rolled out on all our websites and which is ready to accept a large number of users. Yes, such a platform is up and running today, but … you haven’t seen our drawing boards lately 
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves again. More on that in the coming days/blog posts.