Code freeze done

At last the day we have been waiting for past 1 and half years has come. Code for our first release has completed and tagged. We are in the process of deploying all our products on the servers. Lot of code has been written, deciding what is ready to be released and what is not has been a very hard decision. One gets tempted to release all in one go. We have not only cut features within a product but have decided not to release some of our main product offerings e.g. Shared Cloud App, Dedicated Cloud App etc. Very soon in the coming weeks they will be released.

The main issue which was troubling us i.e. sub domain mapping and session issue has been resolved. The SDK documentation is almost in sync with some minor changes pending, which will be surely done by tomorrow EOD.

Once all servers are up and running plus a complete regression testing is done we are all set to launch.

Still working on the website content, Licenses, Terms and Privacy policy, hopefully by Friday we would have completed the content and linking of all the pages.

Office help is still missing …have found a replacement. Hopefully things will be back to normal next week when he joins. Currently have tied up with a tea/coffee shop who delivers twice a day and all team members are helping in keeping the office clean.

Enough for today, have to get back to writing the site content

Hmm ….

Had planned something else for the day but the day got spent on trivialities of existence. Personal  and financial issues cropped up and when I reached office, administration took so much time  that it is not funny, these are things which you normally take for granted when you are working for corporates. Our operations person is on vacation. The office help has suddenly disappeared without telling us the reason. Next months salary has to be calculated. We are not at full strength, our main team is on vacation. And above all the accounts consultant is changing his advise every other day … still cant figure out what is the right way to calculate tax and what is wrong. Absolutely don't want to be on the wrong foot on this .. Irrespective of the above got the bank accounts which will support at least 8 popular currencies … though we are far away from charging our customers and the sub-domain problem is still troubling us. But surely we have covered some inches towards our goal.

In the evening we realised that we needed some more API’s for our launch to make the service complete. Its a big decision whether some features which have emerged out today should be incorporated or not. But prudence directs you to be wise and leave it for future. But believe me its a difficult decision when you get into the shoes of the user of the service and feel that the feature should be part of your launch offerings … at the end decided that we stick to our current goal. No more new features till our launch … period.

Tomorrow complete focus on the site and solving the sub-domain problem and site content.

Next week going live seems like a reality – Yes I can see the summit peak but still there is lot of ground to cover.

Countdown begins …

So the countdown has started to launch Shephertz offerings. Today we finished our coding and it has been released for a final round of System testing. Started focusing on how the site will look, whether all links are in place and not broken and above all whether our OpenID integration works seamlessly across multiple products. , It has been challenging to make it work with sub-domains. Thankful to Godaddy for their great support who helped us solve DNS and subdomain configurations issues on the phone.
Though it was a big and risky decision which we took 3 weeks before to move to OpenID but that was a necessary step to be taken. Centralized Identity Management is crucial for our customers unified experience especially since we will be launching multiple products next week and some more thereafter in the following weeks. Now we have developed our own OpenID provider and our different products work as relying parties for authentication. The implementation has put us two weeks behind schedule but at the end it has been a worthwhile decision which will pay heavy dividends in future.
Since our main product offering is a cloud platform which provides multiple SDK’s, documentation has been a humongous task as we are supporting multiple technologies and device types. It has been a great challenge to coordinate across teams to keep the documentation and SDK’s in sync across SDK’s
Next 2-3 days will be focusing on the site, licenses, terms and conditions and our social media marketing strategy.
Apart from the pressures of start up and the entrepreneurial challenges it has been absolute fun developing this App42 product line with such a great team. Instead of sitting in cubicles and in different rooms, recently we decided to all work in the same room with round tables. It has immensely improved our productivity and above all exponentially increased our fun in coding and having meetings directly from our own seats. We just turn the face of our seats towards the person who wants to initiate any discussion. No meeting requests, no appointments and no coordination.
We look forward to also listen to our favourite music when one of our colleagues takes the role of an RJ who plays music on request while all of us hum our way to coding.
Time to hit the sack … tomorrow will bring new sets of problems and challenges plus many more successes but above all, we will be working towards getting one more inch closer to our dream.