Words into Practice

Back in May of this year I wrote a little something advocating for you to build dumb things. I have been doing this for years, and love it. It's a great break from a career where you often times feel every decision carries the weight of failure, like a binary based Sword of Damocles constantly hanging over your computer ready to crush your hopes and dreams at a moments notice.

I really need to calm down. But I digress, back to Building the Dumb Thing. To put my money where my mouth is, as they say, I have been building, as I have time, a supremely dumb thing and I am going to introduce the app here, as well as the thinking behind it, etc.

First, some context

So if you have ever used Dribbble you know its a sophisticated app that is used by talented designers around the world to showcase their work and find new business, etc. It's fantastic for that and the team behind it has really hit it out of the park with the feature set, etc.

The thing is, it didn't start life that way, at all.

In the beginning there was dribbble (lowercase d)

dribbble first hit the inter webs in 2009 via a private beta. The goal of the app was simple, intuitive and important:

... Dribbble started as a platform for a tight-knit community of designers and illustrators to share what they were working on... Renee Fleck

I am an art school survivor, and the uni I went to helped desensitize you to critique, so I was more than happy to receive feedback, positive or negative. It was a really helpful community and it made me, and I imagine quite a few other folks, better designers. For a while, things were good.

But eventually as companies do, they pivoted:

... we’ve evolved our mission as a company to empower designers around the world to build a successful career in design. Renee Fleck

Look, I'm not here to comment on the direction of Dribbble. They have a business to run, and as stewards of that company, it's investors and employees, you have to make hard decisions. I am have been in that position multiple times, and I am in it right now, so no shade, hate or any of that.

All I will say is that once this shift happened, I had no use for Dribbble anymore. I am pretty sure there are tens of thousands of designers out there who had the same feeling and ultimate decision. Move on. The issue is there really hasn't been a place to move on to in the years since.

So...

Yeah, I am building a Dumb Thing™ called iterator. It's an homage to old school dribbble, with a few updates and twists. Let's break it down.

The three pillars of iterator.

• We live in a world of AI training and you never really know when, why and how services you use that you don't control will sell the rights to train models on your work. We can always hope that this won't be the case, but don't bet on it. Large checks can change ethics and morality. iterator needs to address this in someway.
• One thing I agree with Dribbble on is that the world of design is changing and expanding. iterator needs to embrace and support designers of different media.
• This isn't going to be a business. It can't. So hosting a single, monolithic saas app is a non starter, also see point 1. iterator needs to embrace another paradigm.

After having a thunk, I came up with a sketchy plan, my favorite kind of plan. Let's take a look.

• To resolve pillar 1 above, iterator is self hosted. It's conceivable that someone could create an instance of the app and do something nefarious with it, but I can't really stop that unfortunately. I'm hoping folks setup their own instance, if I make it easy enough, so that they have complete control over everything. We'll see.
• As for pillar 2, iterator supports image, video and audio out of the box. If/when more formats are needed, they can be added in a future version of the software.
• Finally pillar 3 is handled by iterator being open source. When I have a decent beta, the source will be released via GitHub. I am hoping a community of designers and developers grow around it, updating and extending it as we go.

A few other morsels of information for you.

• iterator is a federated app! Yes like mastodon and a bunch of other apps you've never heard of, this app can find and join other nodes, allowing the data created on a single instance to show up in any other instances that are connected. This allows for people to own their content, while still benefiting form a hopefully global community. Not everyone will want to host their own instance, so you can of course create an account on an existing one. There will also be an invite system that can be activated so that admins of that instance can control who is able to join.
• Lastly, for now, there is an auto discovery system. If this feature is enabled every instance will ping a central service to register itself, and just as importantly, to connect (subscribe) to all the other nodes that are in the central DB. There are moderation controls, etc so you can choose to de couple with another instance if needed.

Okay that's it for now! I have an alpha running with about 85% of the features needed for a beta release. This is being built in a "where I can steal a few minutes" process, so I don't really know when this will be live, but I will keep people updated as things progress.

Let me know what you think in the comments!