Depending on whether or not your ISP pays attention to DNS TTL’s, you should now be seeing my new baby at http://www.bluemountain.com. There are some transitional issues still in effect for those of you who might have just sent a card on the old site, but otherwise the launch has gone very smoothly so far.
w00t!
- Mood:accomplished
- Music:U2 - “Until the End of the World”
5 responses so far ↓
Ack! It’s all commercial an’ shit! ;-P
It was already all commercial ‘n’ shit. I don’t have a say in that, at least as long as I want to be employed.
But it rocks because I had to design the whole thing and write a huge chunk of it and hand-hold all the “little ones”.
So what all did you design?
I try not to toot my horn ever, but I think it maybe comes down to a question of “what didn’t I design?”
Basically what happened is Dave and I went off to talk for like two weeks, make little drawings, and basically step through everything that every page and business process on our sites did, does, or has to do. We designed a sort of “grand unified theory” architecture consisting of common objects which abstract out all or most of the commonality in function and business logic. The object model that we developed was the basis for the construction plan (aka who writes what, and when is it due) that was used to guide all the development so far.
I provided a LOT of low-level utility code that is used by our homegrown application server, as well as by the application itself, the kind of stuff that provides for the basic ability to run a site and set up the stuff the site needs to know about itself. I then wrote most of the card sending process (nearly everything before you get the “Yes, we sent your card” page) as well as two-thirds of the back half of the subscription process. I was originally scheduled to do many of the member tools (address book, scrapbook, favorite greetings, etc.) but due to time constraints we farmed out a lot of code to other developers so that we could be as efficient as possible about getting it all done.
Now we are busy porting our other existing sites (AG, EG, BeatGreets, etc.) onto this new platform. By the time we are all done, all of our websites will be what Dave and I came up with. It’s kind of scary, but I guess good for the resume, and it sometimes impresses me.
So that’s why I have basically fallen off the face of the earth in the time since August, and why when you do see me I may seem a touch mad, or simply very very tired.
Just in case I over-tooted before… There were a number of subsystems that we were able to reuse without much major effort (the code that makes cards display all pretty on the screen, the code that makes the menus and the “buckets” of card thumbnails, etc.). For that stuff, I was the “glue together what we’ve got” man, rather than the “I, Hercules, will rewrite ALL WEBSITE CODE! Ph34r |\/|3!!” man.
Man, I’m tired.