(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
13 , 12 , 11 , 10 , 9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .
Episode 14 – October 23th to 29th.
Monday morning 8am. I walk into the office. I have an 8am call so I'm in early. As the door slams behind me, Dan and Karl’s heads pop-up from the couch. I spin around. It is clear they pulled an all nighter. Unfortunately, it won’t be their last this week. They are not the only ones. In the India office, Sajan, Amod, RK, and many others seem to be on IM all hours of the day.
There are always those people in a company who say, “I work smarter not harder.” I’ve never believed that is enough. Given this is the 2nd time I’ve build a company I can tell that I am way more efficient than I was before. However, I believe the startup world is super competitive and to win you have to work harder and smarter. However, despite this view, even I have a limit and the team is clearly there. This week however something bigger than my desires is driving the team. It is their desire to get this site out and their own pride. Thus, unbelievably the pace quickens even further... driven by what seems to be passion.
On Monday morning we have a user test of 20 people. For the first time in weeks we have a working build. The test confirms that we are on track and finds a few bugs. Both of which are good news. Now each day we meet at 6pm and review where we are and open items. The war room is our front conference room. Each day we make a new list of tweaks and the next day we see how many were done.
As any engineer can attest it is exhausting to have to make changes to have a stable build each day. We work on. Things are really starting to click all over the company. The good news starts rolling in:
- The software build is up and working
- The UI is almost finalized and complete – Dan’s made a brilliant Ajax framework decision that has really made this part easy.
- The user satisfaction with the categories we plan to launch is quite positive
- The data from the crawl is finally cleansed and is starting to get indexed
- Beth completes the hiring of her team
Everything is looking up…
Of course we start seeing bugs and we start the bug list. The list is 231 bugs long. We start hacking away at it.
Monday night we are at the office until 8pm, Tuesday until 10pm, Wednesday until 11pm. This continues until Saturday night at 1am I leave to go home and pack for our press tour. The rest of the team is still there. The bug count starts falling. We now have only about 11 days until launch.
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Posted by: ypee200 | November 08, 2006 at 09:55 AM
Can you expand on your comment regarding the Ajax framework. Which one did you guys use and how has it been a brilliant decision.
Posted by: sameer | December 06, 2006 at 04:33 AM