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I know it has been a while since my last post. We have been in Atlanta since mid May and have made a ton of progress on Kinnection. It took us longer than we expected to settle in here which means the beta was delayed a couple of months. That said, I’m very excited to announce that the Kinnection beta is now live. Anyone can signup for a Kinnection account and start sharing memories with family and friends. Give it a try!
I never thought I see that day that I would buy a Mac as a development machine. I knew I’d get a Mac at some point for my personal use (I’ve just been waiting for my PC to die). The Mac functionality and look and feel is just far superior for home use. We have been using our primary home PC for development since Nov and slowly but surely, Windows has been crapping out. The last straw was when Windows installed some patch and made it so that we couldn’t launch IE or a Windows Explorer window anymore. [Insert disappointed head shake.] Mike and I kept reading online that a lot of Rails developers use Macs now since it is UNIX under the covers and I presume because the OS it great to use. I have to admit, I already love my new iMac and we only just pulled it out of the box. I splurged for the one with the huge monitor since Mike and I code together and it makes it alot easier to see the screen from both of our chairs. I can’t wait to download TextMate and get started.
I have to say that I was impressed with how easy it was to get Google Analytics setup on Kinnection. I can see how monitoring site traffic and usage can become an obsession. My favorite views are the Visits and Pageviews, Platform and Browser Combos, and Geo Map Overlay. Since only my family is using Kinnection right now, it’s funny to see the Geo Map Overlay. Obviously, it pinpoints my mom, sister, dad, and cousins. We also added some tracking on our site to see what features people are using. I can’t wait to open up the beta. We’re just not ready from a feature standpoint yet. Hopefully, soon…
Last night we rolled out a few new features to Kinnection. I was once again surprised by how quickly you can develop a feature using Ruby on Rails. The features we released weren’t ground breaking or anything but they made the site much more useful and fun. I’ve got the family trying it all out now. I think I’m spending almost as much time using the site as I am coding new features.
We have been rapidly developing features for Kinnection for the past couple of months. Now that we have deployed and have a handful of users, we started to discuss how often we should update the livesite with our new features. While it’s great to get features and bug fixes out as quickly as possible, if you deploy too often your users may notice some instability in your product. But since it is so easy to deploy and rollback RoR applications with Capistrano and all our users are related to me, we decided to deploy every time we have a big chunk of functionality ready which typically works out to every week. This frequency seems to strike the right balance of getting enough new functionality in the hands of our users and stabilizing the code base.
I spent some time yesterday and today getting a few of my friends and family members onto Kinnection. It is very exciting to have real customers but we are still pretty buggy. For instance, when I signed my mom up and she logged into her family page, some test content I created accidentally appeared on her page. She was not as amused as I was by the “Who’s your daddy?” poll on her home page. Whoops, sorry mom! 
I had a blast with my half siblings in Pennsylvania creating dueling polls on who the best family dog is, and who’s the cutest sibling. Sigmund is tied for first place by the way.
Mike and I spent the last week adding all the test code we ignored while implementing the alpha. We set out to make every Friday “testing and code clean-up day” but that seemed to fall by the wayside after the first week so now we are really paying the price. A lot of the code we deployed ended up not working properly and I haven’t been able to get my family to try things out yet. We still have more test code to write but we are getting closer, thankfully everything works again. Hopefully, we’ve learned our lesson and will be writing test code as soon as we add new features. Like everyone else we started out with the best intentions but then our desire for new features got the better of us. Sound familiar? Anyway, the test/clean-up slog should be done this weekend so we can start adding new funcionality again.
Well we did it; http://www.kinnection.com is finally live. The guys at Rails Machine were great answering all of our newbie questions. I know it’s just an alpha but I am thrilled that the site is up so we can start getting some feedback from real live customers.
Last week we decided that we were ready to host the first version of Kinnection for our family to start using. I was talking to another entrepreneur in Seattle recently, who told me that if you aren’t embarassed by your first version then you waited too long to release. The goal of course is to get feedback from real customers as early as possible. Well I have to say that once Kinnection goes live my cheeks will be burning. The site is really rough in spots and hasn’t gotten nearly enough testing but sometimes you just have to take the plunge.
Mike looked at several options for hosting before deciding on Rails Machine. There was no question that we were going to host somewhere rather than do it ourselves. Neither of us has this experience and we felt that our time would be better served building the product instead of learning all the necessary skills to administrate Linux and make Rails work in production. Mike convinced me that we really needed to go with a hosting provider that specializes in Ruby on Rails. This narrowed the field somewhat but there were still a bunch of providers out there. The next big question was whether we wanted to go with a shared hosting solution or not. While it is way cheaper, the sense that I got from talking to several Rails developers in Seattle was that it is a bit like the “Wild Wild West” with a lot of people doing things that should never be done on a shared server resulting in downtime for everyone else who happens to be hosted on the same box. I decided this wasn’t the right approach for me. Instead I went with the virtual private server approach. It costs a good deal more but I believe that hosting is a critical part of any Web application and you shouldn’t try to cut corners on critical aspects of your business. Anyway, I got a lot of positive reviews on Rails Machines so we went with them. Mike is setting up our rails machine now and we should start deploying this week.
You may notice that all of these posts are coming after the fact. Well we were so busy coding that we didn’t have time to set up a blog plus I wasn’t quite ready for anyone to know what I was up to. So here is a little background on how we are developing Kinnection using extreme programming and Ruby on Rails.
Mike left the software world after developing a repetitive stress injury that made coding extremely painful. You may wonder how in the heck he is coding Kinnection. Well, we are doing it together. If you have ever heard of extreme or paired programming that’s basically what we’re doing. I sit in front of the keyboard and Mike sits next to me. He tells me what to code and I type. It took us a while to get the hang of this but now he is getting used to thinking out loud and I’m getting much more familiar with Ruby and the Rails environment. We have caught a good number of bugs with this approach and I’m learning way more about how my site is architected.
At the end of November Mike and I decided to use Ruby on Rails. I did a little Web development many years ago but was extremely rusty. Most of Mike’s experience was as a Win32 developer so we had a lot of homework to do before deciding how to start developing. The word on the street about Ruby on Rails was that it was great for rapid development of Web applications. After going through a few tutorials together we started on Kinnection and RoR has definitely lived up to the hype so far. Given our limitations, I don’t think we would be as far along as we are if we were using something else.
