This Weekend or Bust

For the last few months I've worked tirelessly on my pet-project-cum-fulltime-startup. The cadence of my work has accelerated in recent weeks as I have put myself under more and more pressure to "go live." I have pulled all-nighters or crashed into bed at 5am more frequently than I'd like to admit. Through the neglect of non-essential errands, my car has developed a thick film of grime on its exterior and my hair has become shaggy and unkempt. My eyes are permanently bloodshot. My dog no longer reacts to the word "park."

The only guarantee about working tirelessly is that you will end up tired. And maybe a little cranky. Check, and check.

But despite these tribulations, this experience has been rewarding and worthwhile. I love what I've built, and I hope the world does, too.

This weekend I am focusing all of my remaining energy on launching. In the end, the feature set is going to be well beyond what I had envisioned for the initial launch -- a shortage of external deadlines and product managers leads inexoriably to an abundance of features.

Also, as I like to read about the plumbing and machinery behind web pages, I hope to have a chance to explain all the details of how I went about building the service. Since I'm a one-man team, I've been dependent on time- and money-saving strategies, including technologies like Ruby on Rails, Amazon EC2, Apache Solr and Ubuntu Linux. That, and more, in a future posts.

For now, sleep.