Hugoware

So here is the problem — I’ve got limited key presses on my keyboard to make something awesome happen — even then, the awesome factor is debatable. I won’t be around forever so I need to build something the right way with as few mistakes as possible.

Which leads me to a problem I’ve found with every project I’ve worked on — Who is my target audience?

I know I’m not the first person to run into it, but I still have a hard time committing to a design until I’ve passed this hurdle — which I’m still stuck on as I write this.

General versus Specific

It’s a tough question. On one hand you can try to target a very broad audience — for example Yahoo Answers. You might get a lot more traffic because you cater to a much larger group of internet users. However, at the same time it seems that the more general you are, then the more competition you have — most likely with more programming resources on their side.

On the other hand you could try to hit a specific audience — for example StackOverflow.com. Same general idea, but more attractive to a specific group of people because they know that the content they are going to find is going to coincide with their interests. But unless your that specific group cares then you’re left with a product that no one cares about.

Is Specific Less Competition?

I was speaking with a guy where I work at the other day and we started talking about one of his friends who made it big in software development. He made big bucks selling a software package he had designed and was living it up in style while he worked on his next project. What was the software? Office management tools? A Facebook/Myspace style application?

No — Surprisingly it was software to manage State Fairs — You know, those carnivals that show up in your city from time to time. The thing was that there wasn’t any software out there already. Instead, the market was completely empty and ready for someone to swoop in and grab up all the customers.

Does “specific” targets equal to “less competition” — I’m not really sure, but it certainly seems that way.

Still Stuck

I’m still stuck trying to decide what to do in this situation. Do I go for the bigger audience, knowing that I have a higher amounts of competition — or the specific group where I have a much higher chance missing my mark?

What do you think — which audience should be the target of programmers with limited resources?

This blog is focused on being about general development along with a lot of discussion about my projects I’m currently working on. I’ve cleared out all of my other blogs and created this one so it can be a broader discussion about development than the others could be.

jLinq is the main project I’ll be posting about for now. jLinq is similar to LINQ for .NET, but it is used in Javascript. It’s especially useful for working with medium sized arrays of information that won’t be changing.

Most of the time people use AJAX to make calls to their server and download the information they need. jLinq allows you use many of the same functions you use in LINQ, but against existing data on the page. 

One of the most important parts of jLinq was that I wanted it to be easy to extend. In fact, at one point the whole jLinq library was wiped and started over and built around an extensibility framework! I wanted the extensibility to work so well that even the core functions of jLinq was built around it!

I’ll blog more about using jLinq, but for now the best thing you can do is try it out on my website! Please leave me feedback about what you think!

Documentation is still in progress, but there are a lot of handy tutorials that will get you started!