I rediscovered this quote a few days ago, and it got me thinking about that piece of software I mentioned in my previous post.

Q. Why is the software so dang simplistic?

A. In the early days of the Joel on Software forum, achieving a critical mass to get the conversation off the ground was important to prevent the empty restaurant phenomenon (nobody goes into an empty restaurant, they’ll always go into the full one next door even if it’s totally rubbish.) Thus a design goal was to eliminate impediments to posting. That’s why there’s no registration and there are literally no features, so there’s nothing to learn.

- Joel Spolksy in Building Communities with Software

I have a few skeleton pieces of that software sitting on my hard drive right now.  While trying to figure out how to make it work like Joel’s message board, I remembered one of the other axioms of software development: The Best Code is No Code.  It doesn’t make sense to write a new piece of software and waste others time learning a new piece of software when there are very good free alternatives already out there.  They don’t even require me to futz around with servers and hosting.  So instead I’m going to put my effort into building connections on Twitter and Friendfeed.

For the time being, anything cool and healthcare related that I find online is going into one of those two places.  If I outgrow it I’ll move on, but I don’t think that’ll be an issue.  Incidentally, I think that choosing to use these services instead of rolling my own is an example of what I’m trying to learn with this blog.