Rich Buggy » babysitting group http://buggy.id.au Developer, CTO, Entrepreneur Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:24:03 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Web 2.0 in 14 day – Day ummm… http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/31/web-20-in-14-day-day-ummm/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/31/web-20-in-14-day-day-ummm/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:46:57 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/31/web-20-in-14-day-day-ummm/ I’ve managed to completely miss my original 14 day time frame for launching babysittinggroup.com. Life (family, friends, work and the open source developers conference) has taken up the best part of the last week. My new target is to be in beta by this weekend when the next Barcamp Sydney is happening. On the Sunday they’re having an entrepreneurial track for people to show their latest software / project / beta and I think this would be the perfect place to launch.

There has also been some good news in the last few days. On Friday I spoke with our HR manager and it turns out I can operate babysittinggroup.com as a business. Once the site is in beta I’ll revisit the business plan.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/31/web-20-in-14-day-day-ummm/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 day – Day 12 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-day-days-12/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-day-days-12/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:30:31 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-day-days-12/ There was minimal progress today as life got in the way (again) :) . I’ve managed to complete the user registration/login/logout/password recovery with unit testing. In the real commercial world I would have been forced to drop the unit testing to meet the deadline by now. I may still do that but it’s nice for the choice to me mine.Today has also made me question if MVC really is the best way to write a web application. While I understand the value of separating the business logic, controlling logic and view logic, all of my actions look exactly the same:

  1. Create a model representing that page
  2. Save data to the model
  3. Have the model process the data
  4. Transfer the result to the view

Once I’ve finished this project I might look at model-template-view to see if that offers any improvements.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-day-days-12/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Days 9-11 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-days-days-9-11/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-days-days-9-11/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:05:27 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-days-days-9-11/ So far the Easter long weekend has been more of a problem than a help. No work got done on Friday or Saturday. Sunday was a lot more productive and the UI is almost complete but I’m now so far behind my 14 day schedule there is no chance the site will be ready to launch in 14 days.

With the UI close enough to complete I’ll turn my attention to writing code to validate user input and glue it all together. Any outstanding changes to the UI can be completed as I get to those pages.

PS: Even this post is running late.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/24/web-20-in-14-days-days-9-11/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Days 8 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/20/web-20-in-14-days-days-8/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/20/web-20-in-14-days-days-8/#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:30:06 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/20/web-20-in-14-days-days-8/ The start of week two sees me finally move the project into Subversion and Trac. I’ve been extremely lazy about setting these two up. I’ve also been working on the UI which will probably take another day or two. That only leaves four days to finish the project so it’s starting to look like I’ll be running at least a few days late :(

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/20/web-20-in-14-days-days-8/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Days 7 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/19/web-20-in-14-days-days-7/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/19/web-20-in-14-days-days-7/#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:03:00 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/19/web-20-in-14-days-days-7/ The first week is over and I really feel I should be further along but life keeps getting in the way. Perhaps it was a bit ambitious to think I could complete the project in 14 days using only my spare time.

Today was spent creating a new template for the site. The current template was only ever meant to be temporary so that anyone visiting BabysittingGroup.com after I provided the URL could see something and register for a beta invite.

While the new template is a huge improvement on the old one I’ve decided to continue using the old template until the site is launched. Less that a week to go (hopefully).

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/19/web-20-in-14-days-days-7/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Days 5 & 6 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/18/web-20-in-14-days-days-5-6/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/18/web-20-in-14-days-days-5-6/#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:30:57 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/18/web-20-in-14-days-days-5-6/ As predicted not much got done yesterday. Today I finished all of the DAOs/DTOs plus unit tests. While progress appears to be slow a lot has been accomplished. I’m so use to commercial pressures where clients/bosses are more interested in new features or see the UI evolve that being able to write and test the core business logic before creating the UI seems strange. Over the next couple of days I’ll flesh out the UI and decide on the final look for BabysittingGroup.com.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/18/web-20-in-14-days-days-5-6/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Day 4 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/16/web-20-in-14-days-day-4/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/16/web-20-in-14-days-day-4/#comments Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:33:01 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/16/web-20-in-14-days-day-4/ Day 4 was spent writing more unit tests and business logic. It will take another day to complete this. Sadly tomorrow I’m going to be busy with OSDC 2008 duties so I probably won’t have anything to post.

For those of you wondering why this is taking so long, it’s simply because I’m doing this in my spare time. That means I’m lucky to get 3-4 hours per day that I spend on the project.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/16/web-20-in-14-days-day-4/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Day 3 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/15/web-20-in-14-days-day-3/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/15/web-20-in-14-days-day-3/#comments Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:50:35 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/15/web-20-in-14-days-day-3/ Day 3 was spent writing DAO/DTO classes. It’s probably going to take another day or two to finish these and complete the unit tests. While it’s easy to skip writing unit tests when there’s a tight time line I feel it’s important to do this properly and that means unit tests with 100% code coverage. This should save me time in QA towards the end.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/15/web-20-in-14-days-day-3/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Day 2 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/14/web-20-in-14-days-day-2/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/14/web-20-in-14-days-day-2/#comments Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:29:57 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/14/web-20-in-14-days-day-2/ BabysittingGroup.com is born!!

Last year my wife & I had our first child. Just prior to his birth two people told me about babysitting groups/co-ops. It’s amazing the things you never hear about until you have children. What amazed me even more was how this was one idea screaming to be turned into a web 2.0 application. After a little research I registered BabysittingGroup.com. If you’ve never heard of a babysitting group/co-op the idea is simple. The babysitting group is formed by a bunch of friends (so it’s people you trust). Within the group you can earn points by babysitting other members children and spend them by having other members babysit your children. The actual rules for each group can get rather complex which will represent a challenge.

One person in the group needs to maintain the diary (a job that may rotate each month). This person is responsible for keeping track of the points and may also need to ring members to organise the babysitting. BabysittingGroup.com will take over this role making group management more open while saving someone from needing to keep the diary up to date/organise babysitting.

There still a lot of work to be done but I’ve put up a quick page that allows people to register for beta invitations that I’ll send out towards the end of the project.

]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/14/web-20-in-14-days-day-2/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 in 14 days – Day 1 http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/13/web-20-in-14-days-day-1/ http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/13/web-20-in-14-days-day-1/#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:31:41 +0000 Rich http://www.buggy.id.au/2008/03/13/web-20-in-14-days-day-1/ The first thing I need is an idea

  • Search engine
  • Blog/Podcast network
  • Social networking
  • Video/Photo sharing

Luckily I didn’t start this challenge completely from scratch or it could take 14 days just to come up with a good idea. I’m going to keep it under wraps for another day while I finish work on the business plan. I know I said this wasn’t going to be set up a business but I think a business plan will be useful for two reasons:

  1. It will help me focus the project by forcing me to write down everything I want to do and how I want it to operate before I start coding.
  2. If this does take of like crazy I don’t what to be stuck with a dotcom that burns cash then dies a sad death. To prevent that I’d like to have options to monetize it written down.
]]> http://buggy.id.au/2008/03/13/web-20-in-14-days-day-1/feed/ 0