May was a fairly quiet month publicly with lots of behind-the-scenes progress, a little traveling, and lots of learning.
The primary focus during May has been focusing on the code. We clamped down on the features to focus on writing tests, refactoring, and generally making things run smoothly. There's still a bit more to work on, but most everything is in place and working. So from here on in things will be more about polish than functionality.
It's easy to overlook how time-consuming the logistics can be. From reviewing and editing the the privacy policy and terms of service to setting up the production environment, SSL, and bank account, time seems to disappear quickly. Next on the list is getting our merchant account setup, and then most of the logistics should be behind us for the time being.
Of course, it was great to get out to Portland for RailsConf. I got to meet a plethora of great people and I can say that it really feels good to be making a living working with Rails. I got to give a handful of demos, and talking to everyone definitely has me excited to get it in everyone's hands as soon as possible.
Spending all of my time focusing on the application makes it easy to overlook the fact that Sifter needs a public facing site to show how it works and handle registrations. We were able to get the public site to around 85% finished in May and should be wrapping it up completely here in the next week or so.
With the production environment fully setup, we'll be eating our own dogfood within the next couple of weeks. Then, with the majority of logistics behind us, June is going to be about making a big push towards the private beta. It's tough to say exactly when that will happen, but at this point, it's the next major milestone.
We’re creating a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and blogging about it along the way. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.
Grab our feedWe'll only send emails for significant product announcements, and those happen every couple of months at most. Of course, we won't give away or sell your e-mail address either.
Comments
I've been following your articles for a couple of years now, and really enjoy them. Perhaps what I enjoy even more is seeing the sneak peek videos of Sifter. I'd love to see more...
The company I currently work for is using Trac for bug/issue tracking... it's tolerable, but being a designer, I'm big on application interfaces, which Trac is desperately lacking. So, Sifter just may be the way out!