17
If you read Wired, you may have heard of Tripletz.com. The Providence-based company allows site users to compose three-part messages on postcards, which are then mailed on consecutive days, a sort of postal Burma Shave arrangement.
When they appeared in Wired, the resulting spike in site traffic exposed some weaknesses in the site architecture. The Slashdot effect is generally an entirely-online situation, but the Tripletz idea was compelling enough (and the name memorable enough) that thousands of readers followed up on the print article and visited the site. Tripletz contacted us to put out the fires. We pushed the first revision yesterday, shifting a big data-sifting operation out of the Rails code (where it was taking so long the page requests would time out) back into the database engine, where it happened in milliseconds.
There’s a lot to be said for the rapid production allowed by Rails, but when it comes to high-traffic situations, it’s worthwhile to be able to look at the application and figure out where bottleneck operations should be taken away from the comfortable, hip tools of Rails and given back to the gritty old database, which almost always performs them faster. Being opinionated about code can be lead to better results in some situations, but making the application work for the client means balancing the code’s poetry with pragmatism–a balance we’re happy to take on, even if we can’t take credit for the site’s undeniably cool idea.
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5
There are several dates we could use as milestones in the launch of Common Media: the day we agreed, in Rose’s, that we’d give this startup thing a shot. The first few days of business-plan writing. The day our incorporation paperwork asserts was our start date. But the beginning of June was when we actually sat down and started coding on Common Kitchen, the time we really became full-time employees of ourselves.
So it’s been a year now. It doesn’t seem like that long, and it certainly hasn’t conformed at all to the grandiose numbers we put in the (now long-obsolete) business plan. We even have direct deposit now, so we can’t claim to be signing our own paychecks anymore.
There are plenty of startups in the world which don’t make it to their first birthday, though, and like children, the longer a startup stays in business, the longer it’s likely to stay in business. Our first year made it more likely that we’ll finish a second, and we’re actually pretty confident about that second year right now.
And the business plans in our heads still have some interesting things in them, so stay tuned.
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