culann.com

Welcome back?

Hey April Anne - thanks for checking up on me

I’m still around. I’ve been a little distracted over the last six weeks or so - first with the super-secret project (more on that in a moment) that I referred to a couple of posts ago, and with a fairly big personal issue. Lacie had surgery about a month ago and spent several weeks recuperating at home, so between that and work my waking hours have been fairly filled. Happily, Lacie’s doing quite well now (she went back to work last Wednesday).

As for the project at work… well, it’s no longer secret. Viget is building Seth Godin’s latest project, Squidoo (press release). I’d explain what the project itself is, but if you’re interested you’d be better served just to download Godin’s (short) e-book on the subject, Everyone’s an Expert (on something).

Anyways, I’m the lead developer on the project, and for the first three and a half weeks or so I was the only developer on it. Since then, Squidoo’s hired their Chief Engineer and we’ve brought another developer on board, which has helped to spread the worldoad around a bit. Nevertheless, I’ve still been spending some insane hours on this project - and never moreso than in the past week. We’ve been working to two-week iterations, so we’ve delivered substantial amounts of code every other Tuesday for a while now, the last of which was Oct 11th. The weekend of the 9th, then, I was workin’ hard to get the iteration finished off.

And then there was this week - we found out at the beginning of the month that Squidoo wanted to launch their beta today, October 17th. Given that we hadn’t been planning on opening a beta for another iteration or two at a minimum, this was a bit of a surprise - but with a ton of effort from everyone involved, we were able to get things up and running (though far from flawlessly) today.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned ‘ton of effort’ from me involved working til 1am Saturday morning, from midnight to 2am Sunday morning, and until 3am Monday morning, followed by getting back into the office just five hours later. It’s been a long, hard week and a half… and despite the various obstacles we’ve run up against, it’s all been worth it. I love this project, I love the work, and I love the challenge.

All of that’s to say that I’ve run a grand total of 5 miles in the last month. I was so happy to get out of the office today at 5:30pm that I went for a quick mile-and-a-half in the cool autumn air. I’m hoping to be able to make more time to run in the months to come; I’ve missed it, and it would certainly help me unwind after the inevitable stress to come, so we’ll see.

And one more semi-aside: I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s blogs over the past six weeks. Even though I’ve been away, I’ve been following the RBF and the web world as diligently as ever. For all the good things that’ve happened, congrats, and for all the bad things, my sympathies. I look forward to reconnecting with people in the weeks to come.