Equipping an Expedition

It’s been a long time since I last read “Time Enough for Love” by Robert Hein­lein, but I’m hav­ing flashes of one part of it at the moment.

I have an idea for a web applic­a­tion — one that could work out very well indeed, and I’ve given myself four months in star­tup mode to see if I can make it hap­pen. I’m at the end of the second week of this, and I still keep think­ing of things I need to get done in order for this to work. Some of them are com­plic­ated, like cod­ing a fea­ture of the applic­a­tion. Some are sim­pler, like writ­ing a data pri­vacy policy.

In the novel, there is a sequence where the prot­ag­on­ist is set­ting out on a pion­eer­ing trip. With a fixed amount of car­ry­ing capa­city, he works and re-works the list of items to take, and at least once has the shock of real­ising he’s missed some­thing obvi­ous but vital off the list.

I’m going through that right now. My app will involve tak­ing pay­ment for its func­tion. So how the heck did it take me two weeks to real­ise I’ll need to buy an SSL cer­ti­fic­ate, in order to secure the trans­mis­sion of peoples’ sens­it­ive information?

*face­palm*

(This whole is big, scary, and fun. I should talk a little more about it here.)