Blog of Dave

I have had a couple of people recently catch me offline and ask what the heck was wrong with me since I basically dropped off the face of the earth starting about February.

The end of January/early February marked the tail end of a painfully long rewrite of a mortgage loan origination application in which we ported all existing functionality of an existing, poorly written, legacy application, plus huge new feature set into a new slick Mach-II application. Aaron Lynch and I have been the principle developers on the project, and when it came down to crunch time, we were working 16-18 hour days in succession for far too long. Poor InstantSpot had to take care of itself and take a breather from constantly receiving new features. On roll-out things only got worse as the team that was responsible for making sure the hardware end was in place had misconfigured our load balancer, which wreaked utter havoc on our application for more than a week while they worked to resolve it. Then it finally happened...

I hit my moment of total burnout.

With our frenetic pace this past year+, I knew it was bound to happen at some point. I simply couldn't get excited about programming and the idea of "fun" programming like InstantSpot didn't even feel fun.

After getting a couple of Jeeping/Camping trips in and stepping away from coding for a short bit, combined with finally getting our application stabilized, I think I am healed.

Aaron have been working hard on a new spin-off site from InstantSpot and are really excited about its potential.

Then the past few days we were back to our old routine of getting home from the day jobs, getting our respective kids all tucked in, jumping online and banging out code like a couple of madmen. Guess what? Code is fun again!

This week InstantSpot finally got attention again! We added some very cool new features that are helping take it to the next step as a social networking tool rather than just a bunch of linked sites. Until this week it was next to impossible to be added as someone's friend. This fact completely negated how friggin cool our Shoutbox is that allows friends to message each other on individual Spots. We added this ability at midnight last night and already people are adding friends and creating their own conversations on their Spots. It is very encouraging to see and is pretty dang rewarding.

We also added a number of control panel enhancements to help with Friend Management and just ease of navigation . For those of you Spot users that read my blog, go check out the new features. We are pretty proud of them or at least go read about them here !

So what do *you* get out of this? (non-InstantSpot users I mean, if you are still out there!)

Well, I have had a lot of experiences lately that I am logging for future blog material. Things like:

• How Ajax made me cheer... and cry.... and cheer again!
• How Load balancing is great if people know what they doing!
• Why does Microsoft hate web developers?
• How reinitting your application in rapid succession can make you run out of memory!
• More experiences with Reactor
  
• ...more...