Weekend Codefest

The last few days I haven’t felt that productive. Working for an hour at night on my own stuff after working all day is hard going. I am not as efficient at night compared to earlier in the day. I think It’s a big part of why I have not been successful in the past.

But determined not to fail again I am pushing on and plan to have a big weekend of coding. The two goals for the weekend are to finish and test PayPal integration tomorrow leaving Sunday to finish off integration with my SMS provider.

I think both my goals are achievable by the end of the weekend. I can already sense the satisfaction I will get from successfully completing them. Those who have been following my progress would have noticed that I hadn’t planned on starting PayPal integration until mid next week. So to knock this off my list so early will be great for project momentum.

While I have still not completely made up my mind I think I will change to SMS Global as my SMS gateway provider. Clickatell support has been good and they appear to have solved my issue, but the fact I had an issue so early makes me worried about their network. I will probably keep them as a back provider though.

Now all I need to do is get lots of sleep tonight in preparation for the weekend. Oh no… is that the baby crying…

I Need More Control

Integration points are always painful. I am relying on a 3rd party SMS gateway and SMTP server to deliver my notifications. I need them to do their job properly so I can deliver a high quality service.

During my early testing I have found that some SMS messages are not being delivered to mobiles. My provider clickatell shows the message has been delivered to the mobile carrier but the message has not been received by the handset.

If I could I would take control of this myself. In this case its just not practical. When something goes wrong I much prefer to be able to fix the issue myself and not rely on others to solve my problems.

I hope the provider is able to help me rectify my issues so I can move on. Otherwise I will have to spend time searching for another.

I have logged a support ticket with clickatell. Now I wait…

Off to a Flying Start

I have spent more time on the first sprint than budgeted for this week. My enthusiasm levels are as high as they get and it is showing with my work. As a result I am getting to add more features to this fortnights sprint than planned.

The web site is going to be a niche notifications service. My sprints are organised in to the following structure.

1. Notification services
2. User accounts and payments
3. Web Design/UI

Originally I had just planned to launch in October with only email notifications. It is now looking possible to launch with SMS notifications as well. I am excited about this from a productivity point of view.

Documenting my goals has certainly helped with the first weeks productivity. Its worth mentioning at this point that no one has visited to the site yet, so its still only me who knows about the deadline. Despite this the artificial deadline is helping to keep me focused.

From my past attempts I know its going to get tougher in the next month or so. When it does I’m looking forward to reading these early posts and seeing what affect is has on my enthusiasm.

Choosing a Web Platform

You can spend a lot of time comparing the different web technologies available for building dynamic web pages. Well at least I can. And I can find something to like about all of them, with the exception of php of course.

I look for two things when selecting a technology. The first is I like to know that others have used the technology successfully to deliver similar kinds of projects. This makes frameworks like rails, django and ASP.NET all good choices for my project.

Secondly I look at my own skills. It is obviously quicker to develop in a language and framework that I am already familiar with. But sometimes you want to learn a new way to do things which can make frameworks you are less familiar with with valid choices.

The choice of web platform is an easy decision for my project. I’ll be using the ASP.NET MVC platform. This is because I am already familiar with this framework and since I have timeboxed goals I don’t have time to play with frameworks I don’t know.

A Product in 6 Weeks

I have wanted to launch my own product for several years now. It is not a lack of ideas that has prevented me doing this. Rather I start an idea and do not see it all the way through.

My past attempts have taught me that I just don’t get things done. It may sound obvious, but its an easy trap to fall in to. With features to implement, technologies to learn and business skills to develop its easy to get distracted. I have found staying focused on the right things a challenge.

To solve this problem I am time boxing myself. I am committing to launching my service by the 1st of October (its a little more than 6 weeks away but I am going on holidays). The plan is to do 3 iterations of 10 hours. Each iteration will focus on the most important features needed to get the site up and running.

Will the product be complete by then? Of course not. And I am not worried by this at all. The service will have at least the most basic set of features to make it functional. Launching the service will allow me to start getting feedback and verify if there is a market for my product.

The line in the sand has been drawn. It’s time for me to get to work.