Why the long silence? Well, we’re getting down to Show Time. We’re approaching the Public Beta launch date, and we’ve locked ourselves a room, welded the doors shut, blackened the windows, and we’ve all dived into the stream of byte code. We know that when we open the doors and let in the light, all Hell Will Break Loose.
It’s not we haven’t Crash Tested every line of code. Our QA guy has become a Master of Distress, and when we run our code by him, it’s with a mix of respect and dread. If there’s the slightest quirk, he digs it out triumphantly and slam dunks it on the hardwood floor. And this guy was a salesmen before he tasted the bitching coolness of hacking code.
Every day our Big Brains are heading out to meetings, and the phone is ringing hourly with programmers who want to jump on the Gravy Train. When they find out they’re working for equity, they want to get in even more.
The VC suits are dropping by to look at what we’re doing. They’re not throwing money at us, but they can see that our small crew is fine-tuned, lean, muscular—a machine with one purpose. It’s clear that we’re on a Mission, with or without them.
For my part, I’m optimizing the code. It’s a good feeling to yank the engine, replace the carbs with port injection, and see a page load 500% faster. That’s 0.4 seconds rather than 2.0.
Someone asked me why we’re not using Rails? Why we’re not using phpCake? Why we’re not using Django? Why are we using straight up PHP!!?? The answer is simple: we’re programmers, masters of our domain. When we need something, we make it. We’re not slaves to the whims of the Rails Core Team, or the Django Indentation crew. We’re Marlboro men, without the lung cancer.
Too back the word “mavericks” is off the table.
Back to hacking…
