Startup Mullings

A Week in the Startup Life (Week 10)

Note: The content here is from May but I’m trying to catch up soon. The introductions are retrospective but the daily notes are kept in the present tense. Hopefully it’s not too confusing.

The first lesson this week was that using Open Source libraries may start off being very helpful but as your product gets more complicated you will most likely have to customize it to do what you want or create your own replacement. We used an Infinite Scroll library that we had to modify and we’ve also had to modify the an image gallery plugin to do what we want. It’s definitely a good way to get started and there’s no point in reinventing the wheel but be aware that as your product grows the tools and libraries you use will need to be updated. The second lesson was that it’s amazingly useful having a coding cofounder and not because two can write more code than one. It’s great having a second perspective on the technical details as well as someone to call me out for being lazy and taking shortcuts. It’s also difficult to QA your own code so having someone else look at it is helpful. In general, it’s great to have overlapping set of skills between the cofounders and a goal for me is to improve my UX skills.

Here’s week ten:

• 5/21 - Added more events to be tracked in MixPanel and cleaned up the timezone issues for the various social networks we were pulling from. Had a chat with MaxPanel about the best way to track different events and got some useful feedback.
• 5/22 - Gave users ability to delete their own moments. Started caching commonly used templates and HTML.
• 5/23 - Spent some time working on financials around the stock options I was granted in the prior job. The goal was to discover how much I’d need to pay to exercise them as well estimate the tax liability.
• 5/24 - We create our own plugin to have Facebook albums load in Galleria rather than rely on the one provided by Galleria. We need to rewrite this one of these days.
• 5/25 - Fixed some bugs that Sandy discovered around liking/reposting of moments and Facebook albums. Implemented cascading of likes/reposts as well as dealing with the privacy issues that arose from reposting of moments.
• 5/26 and 5/27 - Took the weekend off