Come for the Ride…

You know you’ve had a good night programming when the screens are glowing in a dark room, to the left I’ve got a half finished can of Red Bull and 3 empty Mountain Dew cans. To the right, I’ve got a mostly eaten Chipotle Burrito bowl. Two or three Python references manuals are on the desk and all sense of time has been lost.

I’m a huge fan office ergonomics. I have a hard time focusing unless my surroundings feel purposeful and suit all my spacial needs and I thusly spend a large amount of time setting up my work area before I start a project. Having a purpose built office in my new house has really lent me to designing a good space. On this particular Thanksgiving weekend though, I’m at my future in-laws and have found the kitchen table to be the optimal place to work. Huge kitchen table workspace with a center leaf added holds the laptop and my secondary screen. A spiffy Ethan Allen chair (though it desperately needs proper lumbar support) supports me bum. A refrigerator within reach helps productivity as well.

In the end, it comes down to this. Without a proper work space, the work suffers. Spend some time getting your place together and figuring out what you need. It really can make quite a difference.

To respond to Wei’s post, I didn’t state all my reasons for this project. As you can see, feeding two dogs (one that eats as much as the entire population of Somolia) motivates me as well:

And seeing Wei’s picture only solidifies my impressions of him over the last few months. Dog people rock. Wei and his pups are living proof of that. It’s really great to work with such motivated and solid people.

The founders met again on Saturday… We were due on the status of the project plus we scheduled a meeting with Bryan who we have been considering for business development / marketing position for the last month.

Overall, we are still on track with programming and now with the additional help, I think we are now better equipped to hit our target beta release date and properly market it (or try to). Granted, I would love to get some additional help/backup on both programming and marketing but we’re going to tackle it one step at a time.

With regards to “why we’re doing this…” my reasons are slightly different than Randall’s. As you can see, my dogs love food and I feel the need to provide them with such. They really are spoiled… but I can’t help it; they’re just too cute.

Time seems to be a luxury we don’t have these days. In between the day job, the Startup Weekend and my house falling apart due to a slow leak in a pipe that was finally found and resolved, I feel like we’ve lost a couple of weeks in between where I couldn’t focus on the project at hand.

So, where are we now?

Design - the design has finally been completed, which means I can now blog about the design process and tell you guys what we learned. Overall, this has been a lot less painful than hiring programmers so it was a great experience.

Web Hosting - for whatever reason, we’re still stuck here. We’re at a stand still between what we need vs. what we want. Also, because we feel like we need to scale up pretty fast in terms of storage, regardless of actual usage, this has been an ongoing issue of finding the affordable, scalable solution. Of course, our limited technology know-how of how to manage the cheaper solutions may be what’s killing us here. I think we’ll need to make the executive decision this weekend and just get something otherwise nothing will ever happen.

Business / Marketing - We have not had time to properly search and interview for our VP of Marketing yet. However, I did meet a ton of great people at Startup Weekend whom I can learn from. Will keep the search going for now…

Per Mashable’s blog post, Google’s OpenSocial API is now live. This comes only a few days after the announcement, which is somewhat bittersweet for me.

On one hand, if Facebook joins this program at a later date, it means we can potentially code widgets for all these networks with one fell swoop. In fact, it may also be interesting to be able to code something that taps into all social networks at the same time.

On the flip side, as much as I like Google, it’s just another way for them to force themselves to be the authority on something they weren’t number one at. Being that we work in the web industry, that’s a ‘lil dangerous and a bit too close to home.

OpenSocial Launch Partners

I’m a control freak at times. I like my HTML a certain way. It’s got to be pretty (readable) as well as functional and if it’s not, I don’t feel as though I’m doing it right. This leads to me never really trust people when programming up web pages. However, I’ve got to say I’m pleasantly surprised for some very readable and usable code. I’ve finished up programming the car details page and the car search page. With the code I wrote in Python-Django, I just plugged the HTML into my templates, made sure some loops were formatted properly with the pre-generated code and within 30 minutes I had the pages up. The majority of the time was to determine where to put the CSS files, image files and how to link them up in Django’s framework.

Now, granted, my XML feed formats are messed up and need a reworking of the model as to allow for some null fields I’m now finding, but that shouldn’t be more than a days worth of work.