Thursday, May 31, 2007

Doing nothing, really

I spent most of last weekend watching basically all of Heroes season 1. I did get some stuff for Diffle done (like a utility to do diffs of database schemas, and another one for diffs of directory trees), but far less than I would've liked to. My brain basically felt fried all through the long weekend.

I hear stories about "the startup life" and how people basically work 24/7, and wonder if this means Diffle is fated to mediocrity. I guess nobody will be reading this if that's the case, so I shouldn't worry too much about it. I've found that I can put in couple-week-long stretches of fairly hard work (moreso because the darn day job means I'm fighting fires all day at work), but I crash afterwards and just basically veg out for a week or so.

Still, I guess we've gotten quite a bit done since the last entry, nearly a month ago. We put about a week of work into Bootstrapacitor after the second launch before giving up. I suppose I should write a post-mortem for that. Then I did the layout for Diffle and got far more intimately familiar with HTML/CSS than I ever wanted. Mike was working on the shooter game for the full Gameclay site during this time...it looks pretty impressive already. Then there was performance testing, some indexing, some missing features like prefs and the feedback form, and auto-deploy. Am working on auto-deployment now; it's the last major thing we need in place before launch. Well, that and figuring out what's wrong with our e-mail server.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Bootstrapacitor

Relaunched Bootstrapacitor yesterday evening. Response is still a resounding thud.

There's some feedback, but still no users. I suspect the feedback is masking the real problem: people just don't need it. The story doesn't fit into people's lives. So even if it looks like a good idea, they won't use it.

Gonna switch focus to Diffle for a bit. A lot of the code we wrote for Bootstrapacitor actually consists of bugfixes for the Diffle framework & libraries.