Unbelievable initial research
The past month has been fairly quiet online for “The Project”
There’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes. I suppose the scenes would be the people following the blog. Last weekend was the first major on site research done. There’s been a lot of pre-planning and idea development. Last weekend went very well.
So to bring readers up to speed here’s what the last three weeks have been:
Software:
The backend system seems to have a fairly finished “Proof of concept” in place. The back end is the database and the JSON/REST APIs into the data for consumption. All data seems to be going in and coming out as expected. The entire system is also currently locked down behind Tomcat’s firewall system. The backend is also now protected via a VPN for my alpha testers.
Data Entry: There is now a client that works to more easily enter data than creating hard data and importing or worse composing SQL. Currently this client is native to the desktop systems that we are using but enhancing this to a web based system should be a fairly trivial next step.
User client: The client is now working in a very rough form. It is pulling about 70% of the data we want from the backend and displaying it quite nicely. There is more to be done there, but it is beginning to move more quickly again.
Business:
This was my primary focus of the past two weeks. Over this time we have secured the name, the web domain, a post office box and other electronic contact information. This week we have ironed out a lawyer and filed the DBA as well as the LLC. Currently the Business plan is under development and going along well. We received initial seed funding through about the middle of 2014Q2 so we’re getting close to the grand announce and pray for support. A kickstarter for phase 1 is under development and there’s a very promising logo design (for what little that is worth)
Research:
Last weekend a survey was opened in the name of the business. So far we’re up to about 40% of the respondents we’d like to see. But this is again not even a week in on a 3 week survey. So I think things are going well. The responses so far have been absolutely what we were hoping to see to validate the business idea. Some fantastic first contacts were made for potential partners/contracts for our opening foray.
So, what does this all mean?
Next week we’ll be lifting the veil on the initial part of the project. This will also include priming people for a Kickstarter. This of course is an early warning to tell readers to help us plug the fundraiser.
Please help out “The Project” as you hear more and subscribe to the blog, give us feedback, and tell others to subscribe as well.
Thanks for reading. The vague ends on Monday!
About 3 weeks ago we were referred by a friend and fellow parent to a site called #Pleygo. An interesting service hailed as Netflix meets Lego. You subscribe and get a stream of lego sets sent to you. Depending on the plan (low, medium, and high) you can pick from different sets. Medium for example would be about $30 a month and sets would be about $85 on the shelf to buy.
The first image upload API is now finished. This API will now take images in any format and save it tied to a relevant record in a web neutral format to the archive. This work took more effort than I expected, but it’s making things move very well. I’ve also fixed several links so that development and production environments work exactly the same. The client is now pulling entirely from the new APIs and works when used over the VPN. For some useless statistics I now have over 100 active source files with about 110 lines of code on average per source. This seems very short but the reality is that there are several subclasses that are very tiny working off nicely complex but not obfuscated super classes. I am likely missing a tonne of material. There are also several test apps that are folded in there whose entire purpose is to test APIs. Once they are removed the numbers will be a little more realistic. However, the important thing in development is not the size of the work but the results.