Interdubs hit another milestone: I just pushed code update number 500. One of the beauties of an internet application that you host is that the code can be changed easily. All clients always run the current version. Since all information of interdubs exists in a database it is pretty easy to update and change code. Users suggest things, and it is often quicker to just write the feature and see how it is been used. If it is not gets used then it will go away again. That is the other beauty of a web application: you can see exactly how people are using the application. When I develop the interdubs code I usually develop it in a test segment. Once it works, or at least I have convinced myself that it would, I publish or ‘push’ it all client segments. I wrote a little version control system for this, and one of the features is that it does count the updates that went live. And just now I did update number 500. Five hundred times I put my results out there to make Interdubs better. It’s fun. For me and for the people that use Interdubs. Seing your suggestions and ideas getting implemented is encouraging users to think what could be better. Most of what makes Interdubs so useful resulted from user feedback. I just put a platform out there that worked with what I thought would be good feature set to start with. The plan always was to develop Interdubs around the needs of the users. With thirteen different customers right now I get a very healthy mix of feature requests: The rule is that if two people from different companies ever asked for a feature or have a similar issue with an existing function the task instantly bubbles up in priority and gets done as quickly as possible. The other nice effect of those five hunderd updates is that new users have a much better time with backend interface then they used to a couple of months ago.
Month: September 2007
Back in the day it was widely mentioned that you had to spend 20% of your worktime at Google at an project that you personally care about and that is not directly your ‘day job’. Rumor has it that gmail got started that way. I could guess that the google earth flight simulator was such a thing. It must really really suck to work for Yahoo and having to observe how your competition runs circles around you.
On the other side people are guestimating that the average google employee gets up to half a thousand emails originating at google. A day. It is interesting to see how Google will do in the future. It’s history and application are truly unprecedented. It’s impact is quiet astonishing. My daughter, being 7, never was on the internet. Try to keep it that way for as many years as possible. But she is a curious person. The other day she wanted to know what I am doing. I explained that I added another internet server. She wanted to know how many I had and what they were used for. The next question she had after she heard me talk about my current and future setup was: “And Google, how many servers do they have?”.