Startup Mullings

Need for Speed - A Week in the Startup Life (Week 9)

Note: The content here is from ~2 months ago but I’m hoping to catch up soon. I’m going to start writing the introductions retrospectively but keep the daily notes in the present tense. Hopefully it’s not too confusing but let me know if is.

This was another productive week getting our new profile page ready. Our goal was to make Glossi’s profile pages look better by adding a larger image and an improved layout. We also wanted to increase the speed as much as we could. An approach we ended up implementing is to first load the user’s profile information and then load the user’s social media content asynchronously. This way the top of the page loads immediately and the content appears when it’s ready. Because the page is broken into various components it also became easier to cache certain fragments and further improve the site speed. One issue with this approach is that the Google bot doesn’t crawl the asynchronous content so we’re working on a fix.

Here’s week nine:

• 5/14 - Made a ton of improvements to Glossi’s infinite scroll to prepare for the new profile page. I’m much more comfortable with Javascript now so I made some changes to the library and submitted a fork request on github. Our goal was to make the infinite scroll library load from a different url based on user actions on the page which the existing library didn’t support.
• 5/15 - Finally got multiple queues working using Celery and RabbitMQ. This allows us to have high priority and regular tasks treated differently. This also leads to site speed improvement since we can do certain things asynchronously that we weren’t comfortable with doing before since we weren’t confident that they would get done in time. The reason I didn’t do this earlier was because I made code changes in quite a few places and I wasn’t confident in being able to test it properly. After developing a testing approach I became more comfortable with getting it ready for deployment.
• 5/16 - Spent the day working on the new Glossi profile layout which should launch in a few weeks. In the evening, I caught up with a friend who’s working on a startup. We had a pretty interesting discussion about focusing while having a grand vision and how to choose an initial market to target.
• 5/17 - Made some performance improvements to the newly improved infinite scroll by tracking prior calls and only calling when there’s a chance that something will be retrieved. Met up with an old college friend of mine who’s working on a few startup ideas. Contrasting with his first startup (that was successfully sold), he’s focused on building a company that can generate revenue from day one. I wonder if this is a trend
• 5/18 - Fixed up minor bugs with the infinite scroll, multiple queues, and went through server logs and fixed a few issues uncovered by the Google crawler having to do with old cached pages.
• 5/19 - My wife and I held a Miss Representation screening and had a good discussion about women’s portrayal in the media. Watching it also gave me the idea to scrape some data from IMDB and look at the trend of actor vs actress ages in movies. A light Glossi day.
• 5/20 - Started incorporating Mixpanel into Glossi - amazingly well designed product that’s simple to implement and fun to use. I still have a few questions about tracking certain events but I’ll try to figure them out over the next few days.