I just arrived on the East Coast. This isn't a vacation - but at times hopefully it will feel like one. I came out to visit an old friend of mine but find myself in my usual location - a Starbucks. Yup. I've chastised Starbucks a lot. But I find their free wi-fi (since I'm an AT&T customer) unbeatable. And I like to do work places where there's some ambient noise (customers, music) and minor distractions. If I work at home - I tend to get cabin fever rather quickly and find anything to do to distract me. Like eating. Or whatever.
As promised, we've launched our alpha site several weeks back. We're not really open for business for anyone (because our algorithm isn't entirely plugged in), but we've got a dedicated server and full build/deployments going on. We're testing/fixing bugs and moving along. I've come to find that my obsessive nature in dealing with the website will need to take a backseat or at least chill out at some point. I cringe at releasing a product that has bugs. It's inevitable, but it scares me. I feel like a new website has pretty much one shot at capturing its users - otherwise, they ain't comin' back (or at last it'll be pretty hard to get them back). For a large company with marketing dollars behind them, well, it's a whole lot easier. I've even thought of trying Chrome again, because, well, Google is behind it. And I'm sure it's working better now. But there are more than a few startups/products I visit or try, with high hopes, never to return to.
One of our current issues that we're dealing with is handling the data interchange between our algorithm and our database. Our algorithm guru works in Python while we're in Rails. Problem 1. He also works with CSV files and we work with relational databases. Problem 2. Running our algorithm on the fly - quickly. Large problem 3. This will be the most challenging. And it has nothing to do with Rails - so stop your drooling over thinking you can call us out on that.
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