Lots of Resumes and Our First Two Milestones (aka. a Mysterious Package) - 03/15/2007 - 9:10 AM:

I spent most of yesterday printing out and reviewing "e-mail resumes" from programmers that have stepped forward to offer help on the project. Since I'm a visual kind of guy, I went ahead and spread them out on the floor for a picture; there's about 30 serious resumes so far, which isn't too bad for a company that's only officially been accepting them for 3 days, and whose introduction mentions that we have no money. I mean, keep in mind that this time last month, Novel Projects, Inc. was nothing but me sleeping on my friend's couch in California hoping Google might notice I exist.

I've been really impressed by the quality of the programmers that have contacted me so far, both as people and their skills. They're good in every sense of the word. Apparently, starting out as we are, you get both the talented and the creative, exactly the people I want to be working with on any project. What I'm looking for is a variety of factors - location, skill set, why they're interested - and of course, the size of the team needed to get the job done without bloating.

So here's our first two milestones since the launch of Chapter 2. First, I expect to be introducing our first programmer on Monday, which I'm really looking forward to. Second, the first piece of specialized equipment that Novel Projects has bought for this project since my return arrived at the apartment today. That might seem small, but it was really important to the project - by the end of the day, we'd crossed one of our internal project milestones that we couldn't have done without it, and that's pretty cool. It's also interesting, because when I originally worked on this back in 2003, the system I needed didn't exist yet - this makes life soooo much easier.

On a final note, I've settled on a schedule. I'll try to post updates on Monday and Thursday of each week, unless something really cool happens that I need to talk about immediately. So if you check in on Friday and Monday of each week or so, you'll be able to keep up with things as they happen. That, and the RSS feeds are really useful.

So, see you Monday...