Defending or deluding?

Why it’s probably a good idea to distinguish between them.

A couple days back, a friend post about how he’d like to build something that would help authors with version control.

Well, that’s a great concept. Retooling something as powerful as Git, and making it work for authors? Hell yes. Throw in a simple editor that saves drafts as Markdown, and stores everything in a secure Git repository — I can see a lot of authors going for that sort of thing. So without further ado, I got in touch with this friend, and we decided to actually build this. When? How? Okay, that’s too many questions. Obviously, nobody thinks about that until much later.

But this post isn’t about promising to dive into ideas and then procrastinating. No, it’s about the lengths one goes to, to defend such ideas, and consequent plans to dive into them. Take this idea about version control for authors, for instance. A couple of other people commented on the original post, offering up other alternatives. One mentioned Microsoft Word; another mentioned Etherpad. And another thought one could just use Git with nothing fancy on it.

All the above are extremely viable alternatives, mind you; yes, our product would have extra stuff, but that’s what they all say, don’t they? And that’s where I’m heading, right now. The fact that we will go out and defend our ideas, and our subsequent decisions and plans to roll with them, no matter what.

In the case of the idea mentioned above — well, maybe my arguments against all the alternative suggestions mentioned above, were valid. Well. I got lucky. Now that I sit down and think about it, how many times have I embarked on an idea, and then defended my course of action when presented with alternatives that actually made sense? How many times did I delude myself, instead of defending myself against others?

So how do you know when to draw the line, between both? To me, it seems like a very blurry line between the two.

But there’s a silver lining. Again, coming back to version control for authors. When someone mentioned Etherpad, and that it was open-source — well, I did seem to have the sense to know there was a good alternative, right out there. Guess there’s still hope, eh?