An awkwardly late Rails Rumble retrospective
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
My team has already released an “offical” retrospective which can be found here but I wanted to write one up from my perspective - because thats how I roll.
Warren Seen approached me with the idea to do Rails Rumble. I jumped on the chance, because it was something I had wanted to do for quite some time. First thing we needed was 2 other people. We brought Alex Eckermann on board as the designer, and later on, we brought Bodaniel Jeanes on as our last developer. We called our team “The Rad Warlike Annex”, which is actually an anagram of “Keith Warren Alex” (we registered the name before Bo came onboard).
We had a couple of ideas, I wanted to do some sort of Myles Barlow review website, Warren was talking about a freelancer website-thingy (cant quite remember what it was) and Alex was talking about a coffee themed application. We couldn’t really decide on an idea until Bo came up with the desks sharing idea. We all instantly saw potential, and decided to go with that. I came up with the name “desksnear.me”, it was available, so we went with that.
We talked quite a bit about the idea before hand, and came up with a backlog of features. We used Pivotal Tracker to store and estimate the features.
The major problem that we were going to need to solve is not working in the same room as each other. Warren lives in Tasmania, Bo was in the US, and Alex lived quite a ways from me. Alex made an appearance at my place early on in the competition, but fell ill and split.
During the competition, we had a Skype channel open the entire time - this worked super well. We had constant communication over Skype - it was like we were in the same room for the duration of the competition. We also had our production and CI server setup first. The other guys were fantastic, and we worked fucking great together.
Just after the competition finished, search on the site fell over. There was much panicking, and I think there were a few tears (lets keep that between us though). It ended up being a problem with our Google communication pipeline. We reached our 2500 query limit with Google, which we had no idea would happen. We ended up talking to Linode and they helped us organise another IP address. Within an hour, we had reached the limit again.
We couldnt figure out why we kept falling over, we checked Google analytics and noticed a shit load of traffic coming from Y Combinator / Hacker News - surprisingly enough we were number #3. That day we had 8000+ uniques visitors.
We needed to solve this problem. We asked the judges if we could deploy a fix, we got a big fat NO. We asked if we could spin up a new server with the fix, and point public traffic to that, and judge traffic to the old one (with the bug). We got a no for that aswell.
We were planning on pulling out of the competition until @ThorMitchell (Product Manager of Google Maps) randomly poked Bo on Twitter asking us for the IP’s that we were using for the site. At around 10:00PM, he reset our usage, and bumped up the quota. <yoda>Saved we were</yoda>
At the end of the competition, we came 6th, and didn’t win any of the sponsor challenges. But coming 6th out of the hundreds of teams that entered is pretty fucking good. We are stoked with how we finished. We’ve had alot of interest in the app, and people are actually using it to make real bookings.
To date, our most popular workplaces are the Frontier Group in Perth AU, and Engine Yard in the US. We’ve had over 30,000+ unique visitors, 120,000+ page views, and less than 1% 500’s
We’ve got some great ideas coming up, so stay tuned to the Desks Near Me blog for more details.
Thanks to Bo, Alex and Warren for a win team. These dudes are champions.
