Pijin.net V3 – What’s Taking So Long? Or, Markers On The Road To Pijin V3

The first version of Pijin.net was built in a week.
The second version took over 6 months.
The third has taken 2 and half years so far.. and counting!

Here’s why:

March 2006:
Pijin.net V2 went live.
It took me over 6 months to build it.. On the Flash timeline.. Nested code everywhere.. Globals. Nasty. Scary.

April 2006:
Started planning Pijin V3. Lots of feedback. Lots of ideas. Too many ideas.

July 2006:
Realized that it was completely impossible for me to build Pijin V3 at my skill level, or without the funding to put together a development team.
Continued planning and doing conceptual work.
Explored the possibilities of getting funding to hire experienced developers.

March 2007:
Joined Hello Computer to improve my skills and work in a team.
Started learning about Object Oriented Programming.
Wrote my first Class – an important step towards building V3!

April 2007:
Developed my first OOP project in AS2 using FlashDevelop and MTASC – another step closer.

August 2007:
Developed my first AS3 project – another step closer.

November 2007:
Developed my first PureMVC AS3 project -  another step closer.

Jan 2008:
Developed my first fully deep-linkable AS3 project with PureMVC and SWFAddress – an interesting exercise.

March 2008:
Developed my first CodeIgniter PHP project – another step towards V3.

April 2008:
Developed my first ExtJS JavaScript project – JavaScript: a step backwards!

May 2008:
Developed a CMS with ExtJS and CodeIgniter – useful for Pijin V3.

June 2008:
Decided I was finally ready to start building V3 again.

July 2008:
Started working on Pijin on a more full time basis, reduced HC work to 2 days a week.

So, I’m back on track. There is still an insanely huge amount of work to do, but at least it’s work that I am finally capable of doing. I’m hoping to have the Flex prototype ready by December, and a public Beta by March 2009.