| Listi.net actually started when I was a kid and very curious on how things worked. I bought a bike with money I earned from my paper route. My curiosity got the best of me so I took it apart to see how it worked. Now this didn't create Listi.net but it was a start. It got me curious as to how things worked, taught me to experiment and not be afraid to fail. In college a I majored in Computer Science while we were still using punch cards to program a computer. I remember the first language I learned was called Fortran and I was having trouble with the first project. Somehow I got a copy of someone else's program and was able to get my program to work by copying his. I don't remember when, but somehow programming clicked for me after this and I was able to figure out program assignments myself. Next, I'm in Atlantic City in the early 80s and I win at black jack $120. I take this money and buy my first computer, an Atari 800XL. I purchased a book on how to write a black jack training program in Basic. I wound up writing my own program without the book and it was a lot of fun. I wrote a number of other programs for this computer: One of the things I learned from the Random Album selection was that Random was better than the actual choice I would make. Flash forward a number of years and I was working at a consulting firm and had to write weekly status reports. I hated doing this as I know I did a lot of stuff but couldn't remember what exactly it was. We also did lots of planning and project plans. I had to estimate how long it would take to develop the software. Estimating is difficult and estimating how long software will take is very difficult. I worked many hours of overtime due to my poor estimates. There were times I would say a program would take 2 weeks and my manager would say that's too long lets do it in 4 days. I would work like crazy to get it done on time but it would still take 2 weeks after fixing all the bugs the QA staff found. From here I came up with the idea that if I kept a todo list on a computer why not track my time and then generate the status report automatically. This would also help with my estimating as I had a record of how long things took. There were also many other features in this software which I called PET which stood for Planning, Estimating and Tracking. I also use the name InContrl (8 characters) at one point. The software can be downloaded here, note it's not compatible with Windows 7.. The software originally used a project/task paradigm, but then I thought about a List paradigm. I came up with the idea for a list and the ability to create as many sublists as you'd like. I called this List Maker. Years later I was learning to write ASP code and I thought I'd try to convert List maker to the web. I search and the domain Listi.net was available. So Listi was born. On 5/14/2012, I acquired the domain List-Creator.com and am testing which name is better. |