You’ve probably heard the tech startup aphorism “do one thing well”, or a variant on it. “Don’t try to do too many things”. “Focus.” Whatever. I’m not very good at following it, as is pretty apparent from what I’m working on. Growstuff has several things it’s trying to do (crops database, garden journal, seed sharing, community building), all interlinked. Every so often someone points me at a website that does just one thing of the set of things we’re trying to do. For instance, the Continue reading → A few times on the Growstuff mailing list or IRC channel, someone’s excitedly suggested that we should import data from another CC-licensed data set. Each time, I say, “Trust me, that’s pretty complicated,” but I’ve never actually sat down and explained the full gory details of why. The following is something I wrote up for our wiki so that I could point people at it next time the subject comes up. I thought it might be interesting to a wider audience, too, so that’s why Continue reading →