I write & sell novels that generally appeal to hardcore geeks & hackers. I’m trying to sell more of them. My website is my main vehicle for making these books known to the world. But right now, the book-promotion parts of the site are not even implemented yet. There was too much other work to do first.

But let’s assume that I’ll have some kind landing pages and shopping cart done soon, within the next few days.

What then? What itch am I trying to scratch? What problem am I trying to solve for Wetmachine’s readers? And what connection is there, if any, between the value readers get from interacting with my site and the value they would get from buying one of my books?

And now that I have a nifty site with 8 quality writers and a big backlog of articles, many of them still relevant, and more new ones coming virtually every day, what other opportunities lie before me, beyond just selling books?

I’m thinking. . . where’s the itchy spot? I dunno. I’m going to keep looking for it. . .

The key thing is to keep asking the high level question — *sometimes* the answer is a hack or a paper mockup or simply a phone call to a customer to understand what is really needed before creating a complete, robust, performant implementation.

I think TDD often produces verbose, paradoxically bug laden software, precisely because the process encourages myopia. Similarly, I think that there a lot of questions that can’t really be answered until you’ve developed a proper solution for them. People say they don’t like the new feature, but is that because it’s buggy and slow?