Blog
When we first bought our house, the kitchen was unusable. For quite a while we had a fridge full of Hot Pockets and a microwave. I'll never eat another hot pocket again.
The first renovation was a get something in cheap and quick. It worked, but just didn't have that finished feel to it. So last winter we bought some IKEA cabinets on eBay, and this is the fruit of our labor.
Still some work to do, but for the most part we're very happy with the results.
So I was at Sprint for 6 months, I tried to post something about it here, but was asked by my manager the next day to take it down. Creepy, eh? Anyway, my contract was up for extension, and it went down something like this.
I was told I'd be extended, cool. We were told all the projects were cancelled, great. We were told no contractors would be extended, super. I found another job, nice. Just a couple days before my last day I was told the project where re-instated, and asked if I wanted to stay, totally awesome.
I might have considered staying, but I just happened to find one of the coolest places to work in KC. Secure Passage writes Firewall Monitoring software. They've got a mix of technologies, but it seems like the main direction is to move towards Java.
Anyway, it's a small shop, about 7 developers. It's very much a get things done type of atomosphere, which I miss from the good ole Bensoft days. And best of all I get to dress casual all week. Woohoo!
I've been here for about a month. So far I'm having lots of fun.
So I bought an iPhone a month ago, and needless to say I'm very impressed by it. I knew since that day when I was spastically refreshing engadget as they posted Job's keynote, that this device was a game changer. Though my natural disdain for Apple's pretentious commercials swayed my opinion back to skeptic. "Yeah, I can check my email and surf the web on my Windows Mobile phone too, so WHAT?!" But I couldn't resist for long, and as usual I bought myself the thing that my wife was planning on buying me for Christmas.
I have to say that this is a revolutionary device. I know I'm late to the party on iPhone praise, but there are a couple interesting things I realized while I tried to find excuses to use it every hour of every day.
The first is a sort of reassurance I get through the similarities I see to Doodlekit. The design philosophies are very much the same, and it's good to see that such an opinionated device can be so widely accepted.
More importantly however, it's finally allow me to quantify why simple is better. Before I could sit down and explain examples of why simplicity is key, but it was never so clear cut.
Distraction
My old Windows Mobile device had a lot of features and applications, more than the iPhone. But here's the thing, I never used them. However I find myself using every single application on my iPhone. The problem with the WinMo phone is that I was distracted by choices. For example if I wanted to write down a note, I could create a Word document, Excel Spreadsheet, or one of the scribble pad notes. My mind would weigh the pros and cons, then I'd finally just decide to write it down on paper. On my iPhone I just have Notes, and I use them all the time now.
Cut the Unnecessary
I was kind of surprised that the iPhone didn't come with a Todo list. This seems like such an essential smartphone application. Yet I realized that wait a minute, I never used the Todo list on my old phone. My problem was that I would put things on my Todo list that were hard to remember, but I could never remember to look at my Todo list. I tried a few web based Todo lists, but ended up with a much better solution. Now when I need to remember to do something like get new tags for my car, I put it in my Calendar. This way I set a date and time that I need to do it and it reminds me that I need to do it. Not only that, but now I have a history of when I did things.
The iPhone engineers were able to step back and look at how people will really use this phone, and didn't dilute it with the unecessary 10%. So many software companies are afraid to think for their customers, when in the end, that's what the customers are paying for.
Simplicity gives way to fluid and natural actions by eliminating distractions and only focusing on what you really need. I couldn't put it into words like that before.
Yesterday TechCrunch did a writeup on Doodlekit. The article focused on how our advanced features set us apart from our competitors.
My only complaint was the misnomer that Doodlekit is late to the party. According to some of the comments, you don't actually exist until you've been posted on TC. The fact is that we started on DK almost 2 years ago, and did our first major release last year. Blah blah, I know this sounds like pathetic drivel, but hey, I needed to get it out there.
Of course it doesn't bother me too much, because I'll be laughing all the way to the bank! HA! I expected a lot of traffic, but I didn't expect that over 600 sites would be created since the article was posted. As the article rolled to the bottom of the TC homepage, it showed up on the del.icio.us home page.
This was also a good test of the server. Everything held up quite well.
This has been a fun 24 hours. I hope it continues.
Last Saturday we finally deployed the latest Doodlekit release. So far I'm really happy with how things are going. Our signups have already quintupled, and everything is running smooth as usual.
Here's what I'm excited about.
Free as in Beer
We now have a completely free Doodlekit plan that still has lots of great features like a Blog, Photo Album, and Content Pages. Hear that Railers? You can have a Ruby on Rails hosted Blog for free!
New Editor - XStandard
If you've done any research into online WYSIWYG editors, you should know that XStandard is the cream of the crop. It spits out completely W3C compliant HTML, and uses styles instead of fonts. Since it's a browser plugin, and doesn't use the browsers built in content editor, it's a lot more stable and predictable.
Not only that, but we made it a lot better. The editor is not only aware of what color theme you're using, but also what you're editing. So if I start editing a notes box on my sidebar, the width of the editable area will be the same, and the background color will match.
I also built out all the backend services, so when you're inserting an image, you can browse your Doodlekit Photo Albums, or upload directly from your computer. Sorry to ramble, but I'm really psyched about this.
Shopping Cart
In true DK style, the new Shopping Cart is really simple, yet slick as all hell. It takes just a few minutes to setup, and integrates directly with Paypal. Check out my demo.
Performance
Dude, you don't even know.....
I almost crapped my pants when I checked the logs and saw 200+ requests per second. Then I did crap my pants when I started up memcached, and saw 300+ requests per second. And that's per process across 4 processes. More on that to come...
