Ben Chalmers, CTO, shares account of the day:
Our first external pilot - a closed pilot that has only been opened to a group of good friends. Which is a good thing, because day 1 has been stressful.
Amongst the avoidable issues which have been discovered are significant issues with setting up and verifying accounts... which were due to my code trying to be too clever (and failing)
But these then led to a scalability issue when it came to sending out verification emails. Hopefully that has been plastered over until Amazon decide if they will give me the proper fix.
However... having real users (which is to say, none of us inside EI count as being real) has altered my view of the app.
I've suddenly begun to realise that some of the transparency that was intended to be built in isn't actually there.
And I've rightly been called out where I chose a solution which was quick and dirty, over one which made the customer's life better.
So am I down about all of this? Quite the opposite. Real feedback is invaluable. It lets you step outside of your head and get a better view of how others try to interact with your code baby (turns out it is only ever the baby's parents who find it beautiful)
More progress was made in EI yesterday than at any point in the past. The number of people who have played with a live version of EI has scaled by 400%. And, most importantly, I've been able to keep up with and resolve problems as they occur... without going insane... so far.
Here's to even more problems in the coming days !
