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by ohwaitnvm 2787 days ago
I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run.

However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)

I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!
1 comments
jlg23 2787 days ago
> Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.

Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.

Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.

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ohwaitnvm 2787 days ago
That’s too bad. Their situation was that they were working in Pivotal’s office, surrounded by extremely high quality Rails devs who were happy to give free help and advice.

Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.

I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)

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