four bean soup |
A "sneak peek" into the kitchen at four bean soup. |
Every wanted to just jump in feet first and get an app launched? We have! We’ve even done it before in the past, with railsrumble, and we tried to do it again a few weeks ago.
How did we fare? Let’s explore the goals first and then how we did.
We had an overall task list of 10 things for 2 of us to complete. We hired a babysitter to watch the kids from 10am to 6pm while we focused on working. Our major goals included:
I said this in a talk I gave about winning the Rails Rumble in 2007, knowing your tools can make a huge difference. Final Cut, Node.js, and MongoDB all had steep learning curves.
Wendy took on the task of editing the videos while I worked on the node.js tracker. In the end, it turned out to be much more of a collaboration on the video editing, as it took both of us tinkering to get things right and we still feel like n00bs. I am glad she took the lead on this, because I was having trouble wrapping my head around node.js.
Choosing node.js and mongoDB for beancounter was probably a real downfall for getting this task done, but something about node.js strikes a cord in me - it feels like the rails community circa 2004. Documentation and example code bases seem hard to come by. The MVC frameworks built around node.js are all a bit newish without many leading contenders. I am getting the hang of it thanks to @atmos.
Do the simplest thing possible and iterator on working code later. After I made the decision to move forward without beancounter for the first episode, my next order of business was to get a prototype of honeysquares up. I spent about 35 minutes writing the models/db structure/migrations and another hour getting the controllers and js all hooked up. As I deployed and played with the app I tweaked it, but it still lacks an actual UI for now.
Seeing an idea come to fruition can be a very powerful motivator, no matter how basic.
In hindsight, techniques like time boxing might have made sense when playing with new technology. We are still pretty happy with the results of our “launch week”, we finished 50% of our todo list with our small team of two!
We now have small wins to build on and we’ve cleared our plates to keep working on the new tweethopper design.
