Entries Tagged 'ycombinator' ↓

First things first.  My new webapp tuttivisti is live!

This post is about how it came to be. In just one week. One person team. Crazy working hours.

So I was there immediately after receiving the news that YC did not select my team for this round. I thought I would feel depressed. I thought that the put down would ruin my mood.

Well it didn’t! I actually felt a jolt of energy. For some reason I felt a bit as if I had been freed. Can’t really explain why but my motivation and excitement bounced back up.

So what did I do with all this creative energy? Well my partner for diffract.me (the other project I am preparing to launch) had to go for a few days back home and we hadn’t planned our next iteration yet. So I decided to dive into something new, short and sweet.

Yep, I started coding. Again. From scratch.

I sat on the shoulders of giants. For this 1 week challenge I picked some of the most productive tools I know (and these will be topic for a future post):

• Django
  
• Pinax
• Bluetrip
• jquery

I’d love to communicate properly the productivity boost that the set of frameworks above can give a developer.

No more spending endless hours trying to create a decent CSS/HTML layout. Bluetrip (and by saying Bluetrip I mean also the great Blueprint and Tripoli from which Bluetrip has been created) makes it trivial to put the stuff exactly where you want it on the screen. Cross-browser. No hassle.

Pinax. Ah, the joy. No more coding for the nth time a registration module. No messing with authentication emails. No rewriting another openid library. No more. It’s all there. Ready to use. Greatly structured. Amazing stuff. This is a game changer in my opinion.

Jquery. Well it needs no introduction. Jquery is a work of genius. For me it changed coding in Javascript from a painful experience into a pleasurable one. I love Javascript again.

Now will tuttivisti fly? I sure hope so, but the truth is that it does not matter. What I am saying to myself is: If I can build something like this in 1 week the question is not “will I ever manage to build a webapp that gains some traction?” but “How many attempts will it take? Is 5 going to be enough? 10?”. Maybe.

I have a lot more to say but will cut it short. I am at the end of a very very long and demanding coding spree.

Update: The past weekend a new version of tuttivisti has gone live, my 2nd week of work on the project, which incorporated much of the feedback I received, but a lot of work is still needed. So feedback is welcome, and – yes I know – I need a graphic designer.

It’s been a crazy ride these past few weeks.

My partner in crime – nocivus – and I have been working very hard on our submission for the 2009 Winter round of Y Combinator.

It has been a lot of fun.

Creative energy is like a drug. When you’re under its effect you can’t stop working and fleshing out ideas. We’ve been coding like crazy. We’ve been thinking and thinking about what we would really need first, to present a cool demo. We thought hard at the problem we wanted to solve, at our target, at the way we could make money.

So here it is, our creation, diffract.me. We can’t disclose too much about what we’re building but it’s real now. In front of our eyes.

We also picked a name for our company. A funny name. The origin of the name comes from an hilarious piece from Eddie Izzard. Here I present you evil giraffe.