Week 8

Day 50: Stuff has been achieved

Monday, 12th January 2015 22:47

So after a week of farting about with the core of Rainbird I’ve finally got to a point where I’m happy with how it works and hangs together. The process hasn’t been futile, for starters I think we’ve drawn out better ways of explaining some of the fundamentals of Knowledge Mapping. The code itself is also now much more elegant and robust.

That’s not to say what we’ve got is perfect - no code ever is. Ben and I remain convinced that there is an even more refined way of solving questions asked of Rainbird, but we lack the resource to have an R&D team go investigate the problem. That said, chasing ‘perfect’ instead of accepting ‘good enough’ is a great way to kill a startup. I’d wager that most companies barely have ‘good enough’ so we’re off to a good start.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud, and I’m still not where I wanted to be at the end of the Christmas break. Or, to put it another way, I’m 8 days behind. There’s still plenty of scope for that number to grow.

Day 51: Mentor Sanity

Tuesday, 13th January 2015 22:05

So after the insanity that was Mentor Madness we’ve had 80 potential mentors whittled down to just a handful. With the selection process done we can now sit down with these mentors and get beyond the 20 minute “hi, this is us and this is what we do”¹ and into more meaty discussions. Today Ben and I saw two of our mentors and went over a few subjects with them.

One of these was the small issue of the rather large rewrite of the core of Rainbird. There is always a temptation with things like this to keep adding new features and to make it absolutely perfect. I like to think we’re big enough and ugly enough to avoid this kind of problem, but it’s good to be explicitly reminded of it. Having to explain to a mentor why the delivery date has slipped again is a good way of keeping you honest.

Day 52: All green!

Wednesday, 14th January 2015 23:37

All green

For the non-technical among you the above picture probably doesn’t mean much. The fact that the text is green and its got “100%” dotted about the place probably indicates that it’s likely to be A Good Thing™, and it is.

This is the output from rainbird-yolanda², specifically the report telling me how much of the code I’ve spent the past few weeks writing is tested. The 100% means all of it is tested, which is nice.

This becomes important because Ben also hit a milestone today and we’re close to joining the logic he’s written to the infrastructure I’ve written. I may need to tweak a few thinks in order to get everything to fit, and when I do the tests will tell me if I’ve inadvertently broken anything. This gives us a high level of confidence and means we don’t run into unforeseen problems days down the line.

I may be 8 days behind where I wanted to be, but I’m pretty happy with what I’ve produced, and chuffed with the report output.

Day 53: Not playing any more

Thursday, 15th January 2015 21:29

So a huge part of writing this blog was about documenting the authentic Techstars experience - which is a lofty goal, and one I failed at by Day 3. There’s a reason for this.

Despite not bothering a huge amount about Corporate Image this is a public facing journal, and I know how the internet works. You can’t unsay things. So, some stuff needs to be toned down, or omitted entirely. Actually, a lot of stuff needs to be toned down or omitted entirely. There isn’t even a subtext in my day 3 post of the issue that cropped up then.

Then there is the fact I’m trying to keep this PG13. OK, so some things lack the forcefulness that a good sprinkling of expletives brings, but again, public facing and on the internet - so we avoid going there.

In some respect’s it’s a tad annoying that I can’t be completely open here. I’d have loved to have the unedited version to look back on. Realistically there isn’t enough time to do that as well as these entries, plus a lot of the issues probably looked a lot larger at the time than they really were. Perhaps it’s a good thing it’s only this version that exists.

Anyway, with that in mind, if you take something like Day 17 you can kind of work out that, although the highs can be very high, the lows can be very low indeed.

In fact the analogy I used in that post is a good one. Yesterday was a high. This morning, mainly due to being in quite a lot of pain thanks to gout³, I woke up early in a miserable mood. The timing couldn’t have been worse either as we had people visiting us, and Thursdays are the social day. Today would have been greatly improved without people. Any people.

So you can get a sense of what it’s like for me at the moment, imagine your feet in a vice, while at the same time bits of metal being shoved between each joint in your foot so it feels like nothing fits. It gets distracting, and it dampens your mood. It also makes walking problematic.

So come 20:30, or whenever it was, with all of us standing in a crowded pub about to start with the small talk I just decided I wasn’t playing any more. At that point I hated everyone and really didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. So I walked out without even saying goodbye and hobbled home to sulk in bed and get an early night. That’s the public facing version. The reality involves a lot more swearing, or at least it does in my head.

Day 54: Haircut One Hundred

Friday, 16th January 2015 19:35

It’s amazing what 8+ hours sleep and a new day can do. My feet still hurt, but that’s getting better, and I woke up in a much more positive frame of mind. There’s also the fact that Friday/Saturday/Sunday are not crazy days. I left the office about 18:15 today, got a haircut, went shopping, forgot the limes I needed for dinner, and got home for just past 19:00.

Given the lack of limes the light snack I was going to prepare for dinner isn’t going to happen and I can’t be bothered to go back out. Instead I’ll watch a film, eat some nibbles, edit some stuff I need to write and get another early night. It’s practically a day off!

Tomorrow I plan to mess about with the API for Kimono, one of the other Techstars companies, and produce a chat bot. The ultimate plan is to then get it hooked up to the Rainbird API and do something funky via IM⁴, which could be cool.

Day 56: Noise and bouncing

Sunday, 18th January 2015 20:10

This weekend has been a bit of a play weekend for me. I stayed in London, partly so I could get on with a few things I wanted to do, partly⁵ so I could catch up on my sleep and partly because I wanted to go out.

Kimono, one of the companies in this cohort, have given me access to their API, so I spent Saturday writing a NodeJS client for it. I then used that to throw together a chat bot loosely based on the classic IRC infobot. It’s a bit of a toy, but it does prove the client I wrote works. This paves the way for other, more sensible things, like GitHub integration. The eventual aim for us is to get a Rainbird client written for it.

During the evening I finally made it out to Slimelight, my favourite night club of all time. Age, family, and distance means that attending club nights are difficult when I’m at home. It takes up most of the weekend, it’s a long way, expensive and I never really get to catch up on the lost sleep. Being in London and on my own gets rid of some of those problems. Age is still a factor though, and I had to bail at 4:30am, but not before spending 4 hours on the dance floor having a whale of a time⁶.

Today has been spent doing quite a large rewrite of the Rainbird Neo4j wrapper which we use with the new core of Rainbird. I’ve added a whole bunch of new features which need to be tested before I can release it but I’m pretty proud of the result.

A nap also featured thanks to the time I got in this morning. Add to that two awesome home made dinners tonight and last night and it’s shaped up to be not a bad weekend, all things considered. I miss my wife and Willow like crazy, but they’ll be down here on Friday. Given the speed at which the weeks are passing at now, that will be in no time at all.