Alpha, Beta, Proto
Today, the Lifespan prototype lives at https://beta.lifespan.dev, but it’s hardly a “beta” by most people’s expectations. It should really be at proto.lifespan.dev, or something, because that’s more what it is right now.
Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. A beta phase generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta
The reason it’s there is that I’ve been through many internal cycles of trying to make things, and those experiments were partial prototypes, trying out ideas, or parts of ideas. When I first tried to make an app rather than simple bits and pieces, it was called the “alpha” version. When I threw this away and made a new version, I called it “beta”… so here we are.
This is true when I’m writing this, but could be different when you’re reading. It’s almost like time is an important part of thinking about everything :-)