The Spin Cycle

Closing Time for Vancouver's Local Snowboarding Action

Ski Resorts | April 23, 2008

With FS up and in beta mode there has been a few things to touch up but I've definitely had more time to kill than I'm used to. With the extra time it seemed like a good opportunity to grab the board and head to the local ski hills for a bit of Spring boarding. To my dismay they all closed up shop as of last weekend. Now, I'm not the kind to rant but FS needs content and I am pretty pissed that it's 10 degrees C in Vancouver and currently snowing above 1000 meters as I write this and there is no more snowboarding action to be had in Vancouver town.

This season has been a bumper one to say the least. There's been around 13 meters of snow and about a 4 meter base that remains. It makes me wonder if there really isn't anymore money in the season for resort owners. Perhaps they find the only people using the lifts are season pass holders who bring in very little extra cash. Either way, it still seems crazy.

Aussie resorts are generally lucky to have a base of 2 meters during a season. As the snow vanishes towards the end of a season I've seen the snow cats push all the snow from one half of a run on to the other half just to keep things alive. Even then there are gravel patches and puddles a plenty and lots of general chaos to help keep things exciting.

Aussie conditions are definitely the other extreme but surely a 4 meter base is something to be cherished. Oh well, the way the weather is going it should still be there for next season.

Beta Launch Begins

EC2 | April 22, 2008

Today is the day of the much awaited beta launch where the site opens up for a hand picked group of people to explore and break all the wondrous code I've put together. Hopefully the breaking will be minimal but that's the beauty of a beta site - it's there to be broken.

Since the soft launch the site has been very smooth with few bugs reported. The site has undergone a significant change in the form of a hosting move to Amazon's EC2. I'm pretty happy about this as the site seems faster and it definitely has better resources behind it. I'm also confident that the site can grow comfortably in this new environment when the time comes.

I think the beta team will do a great job and I wish them the best of luck in trying to break the site.

Soft Launch Success

Software Development | March 29, 2008

A big thanks goes out to all who've checked out the site and glanced at my three attempts at article writing. I've thought of doing a couple more articles but feel my time is probably better spent getting FS up so people who've actually got talent can get in and do their thing but we shall see. Bay has also jumped on to do some caffeine related writing and some general testing which has proven to be a great help. Who would have thought there would be so many bugs?

Development is still on track and the bugs list has been cleared for now. The mid April beta launch is still in the cross-hairs and I've slipped in a couple of extra tasks including the tiny one of moving the site to a new hosting provider ...eek. This will mean a much better service (in theory) and hopefully less technical issues. I'm sure I'll mention more about the move in the coming months.

And we are Live!

Software Development | March 24, 2008

Flickspin.com has just been launched. Celebrations may now commence. Yay!

This is a huge milestone and marks the most important step in the entire project - getting it off the ground. This project has been in the works for about 5 months in a very loose format. Interestingly it has required me to break one of my main coding tenents; incremental releases with release dates at most one month apart. To go longer than a month allows you to start building buggy code on top of other buggy code and not being able to catch bugs at early stages. Of course there are QA methods such as load testing, unit testing and using products like Selenium that can help you identify bugs and weaknesses but there is nothing like a live environment to let you know what is not well in your code base. Hopefully my QA has been good enough to make this a smooth implementation.

This release is regarded as a soft release, meaning that the site is live to the public but not many people has been notified that this has happened. The plan is to actually keep it that way until future releases.

In the time between now and the next release there will be a number of styles to adjust, bugs to fix, features to tweak and new bits and pieces to add now that the site is in a live environment. The next release will be regarded as a beta release which is schedule for mid April 2008. The beta release will feature hand picked people to help kick-start the writer network and help iron out any usability issues and/or any bugs that were missed in the first release.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. This is definitely a moment to savour. Perhaps it is also a time for hope - hope that the servers don't start smoking.