I don’t even know how long ago it was that I started work on Campus Notes. It’s not the kind of project that has timelines, deadlines, milestones, functional requirements, acceptance criteria or any kind of planning at all. That is, it’s a good project. We’re getting as much done with the time we have and making decisions along the way, dealing with problems when we face them. It’s really starting to gain some momentum now and I’ve had a few people asking “what’s going on?” Here’s what.

Our number of line additions and deletions over time illustrates our momentum nicely.

For me, this past week has been all about refinement of stuff that’s already been built. That’s making the site faster, reducing HTTP requests, re-factoring Javascript, pulling out CSS that’s no longer used and grouping that which is used often. I’ve also been working on support pages like the home page and basic help manual. It’s a great feeling getting to this stage, making what works, work better.

As for Mr Fangel, he’s doing an amazing job creating the Campus Notes API and hooking it up to our UI. It’s an API so good that as soon as we can write some documentation it’ll go public so other developers can write applications that use Campus Notes data. Some of his work is also flowing back into the Javascript and PHP OAuth libraries.

Operating from opposite sides of the globe means we don’t get a lot of time to chat which turns out to be a quite an advantage. Each morning we spend a few minutes dealing with overnight discussion on Basecamp and then we get on with doing real work. We spend less time arguing about whether or not something is a good idea and more time just building it, using it and throwing it out if it’s not right.

Since early this week the UI design and behaviour is complete, support pages like the manual, homepage, blog, etc. are complete. File uploads and most pulling and pushing to the database is complete. There’s not much more to do.

Our loose plan was to make a private beta that, as far as me and Fangel are concerned, is a complete 1.0. Then we’d run a very small (by typical web app standards) private beta which would allow us to field test for a couple of weeks and hopefully would pick up all the things we missed.

Fangel goes away next week which will give me a great chance to really tighten the screws while nothing big is getting added.

It’s not far off. What you should do now is head over to getcampusnotes.com, sign up to be a beta tester and help us spit shine Campus Notes starting in a week or two.