For the past six months or so I've been chatting with my good friend Jon Carlos (@billywizz on twitter) (see his blog for some more preamble to the project) about coming together and developing an open-source social networking platform. We've worked together in the past and we share a pretty similar outlook as web developers. Most importantly we get on and we know that we work well together (luckily having a similar taste in music is not so important. Next code camp I'll be getting back to my grunge roots, that's all I'm saying.). Some of the ideas that we like, to give you an idea, are:

The Duct Tape Programmer (may as well get the controversial ones in there first!)

How to Contribute to Open Source (When You're Not Exactly Scott Hanselman)

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

The Humble Programmer

So you might get the impression that we are not hot-shot programmers - and you'd be right. We certainly aren't. But we have a good idea, and we're willing to give it a shot, and we're even willing to let the uber-programmers in the community see our "work". We are all about making a start, a foundation, for the work to continue from. We hope that people will like what we produce and find it interesting and useful enough that they will make use of it and perhaps even contribute to it themselves.

Initially we thought about developing the site in a number of different ways. We got bogged down in the latest and greatest technologies and even talked about IOC for a while. We both wanted to play with and learn to use this trendy new MVC stuff, and maybe we could use LINQ as well just to be cool. We got nowhere. We read a lot, learned a lot, be we developed squat. So the project kind of died a death for a while. Then we thought about what we were doing and realised that what we really needed to do was Keep It Simple. We also didn't really want to reinvent the wheel. And we both had plenty of good experience with Umbraco. I think you can see what happened next.

Anyway to get to the point Jon and I agreed to commit to two full days of coding with Umbraco to see what kind of magic we could come up with in that admittedly short timescale. And last Saturday was day 1.We learnt a lot, made plenty of mistakes, made plenty of progress, and had a lot of fun. (Non-geeks: fun is a relative term). We aren't about to release anything just yet, as we have a second day to do towards the end of this month, with a view to releasing an alpha (pre-alpha?) version by Christmas. Right Jon? But I thought I'd blog about it and share our experiences with the community over the next few blog posts, as a kind of teaser and lead-up to the release of the package itself. I don't want to big it up too much - but it's going to be AWESOME.