Taegan Goddard

This is in keeping with my daily plan of writing some case studies. This is a comparison, if you dare, or should I say, should I dare, of myself and the subject mentioned above.  How dare you make the comparison, you might ask?  Ok, then make that a comparison and contrast.  What we have here is someone like myself, who labors in obscurity, and this Goddard fellow, who is considered something of a political guru.

The name was familiar to me long before it was a famous name.  Whoa!  Yes, I think it was the same guy I was exchanging messages with on a Prodigy bulletin board back in 1990.  Back then, I had written a computer program that I was trying to sell, and I came across this fellow named Taegan, who was asking people about their programs.  I mentioned mine and he suggested that I get it published.  He gave me a name of a software publisher, to which I sent my program for review for possible publishing.  I believe that it was the same guy here, because the name of his program was called "Liberty!", which pretty much looks like a good fit for which Goddard likes to write about.

Goddard's program was written before the World Wide Web came into being, and it had a feature to it that I admired, but I didn't have in my own program.  This feature was hyper text.  The web uses this technique, and it is used right here in this very post, as I shall demonstrate with this.  You may have heard of hypertext protocol?  If not, look at a web address for "http".  That's what it means, hyper text protocol.  That is the means by which you can download information from the world wide web.

I guess Goddard was on the leading edge and I was off the leading edge, but not by much.

Would hyper text had made a difference in my program's fortunes?  Probably not.  It wasn't published, and probably wouldn't have been even if I did have it.  That brings me to the second point of comparison and contrast.  His program was very simple.  As the publisher said "too simple".  When I examined his program, I thought it was too simple minded.  All his program did was to link case studies of famous landmark decisions in Supreme Court cases throughout the years with the appropriate parts of the US Constitution.  This is simplicity all right.  But it was also powerful in ways that I didn't quite get at the time.  Mostly because of the design principle which I have cited here as the KISS principle.

But this isn't just about software, it is also about politics.  At least this blog is about politics.  And so is Goddard's blog. But I digress a little.  Let's finish the comparison and contrast.  The last point of comparison must be in connections.  I don't have connections.  I suspect that Goddard did and does now. I still don't.  After all, it was Goddard who gave me the information I needed to contact the publisher who might have published my program.  He also knew about hyper text, which as I mentioned, I didn't know.  But I did know about the KISS principle.  One of my program's failures was the violation of the KISS principle.  Perhaps working with a mentor could have helped me overcome the tendency to over design my programs.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.  That is the one of the points in my superhero videos.  Does that mean I am better than Goddard?  No, I don't claim that.  But people may give others a little more credit than they deserve.  They may be fortunate to have caught a break at an appropriate time in their development.  I don't want to seem envious here.  That's not my style, please do not misunderstand.  Rather, I wish to understand the reason for things and that is what I am writing about here.