November 2012
2 posts
The Real Countdown
One of the most challenging journey’s I’ve embarked on is reaching a waypoint. Finally! Despite various trials and some tribulations (or vice versa?), the FoodTruckYP project is coming up on a real 0.9.0 beta release.
What could that possibly mean?
The project was “feature complete” a while back. Sort of. The problem with an engineer running a self-specified project...
October 2012
0 posts
Interesting Times
Some good news, and some possibly-bad news.
First the good news:
I’ve had a couple of discussions lately, as recently as today, about pushing “live” mobile food vendor location and schedule information to press entities. Non-trivial ones. I’ve been saying this for a while, that a big piece of this value proposition is the ability to spread the word far and wide,...
September 2012
2 posts
Another final stretch...
A solo software development project will always take far longer than anticipated. If the solo person is an engineer, double that again.
In my travels I’ve run into the challenge of trying to book events, be they small school events or a former workplace, where the person involved eventually threw up their hands and went with “normal catering.” Too many variables, to many...
August 2012
1 post
Pre-release pivots...
Probably not a great idea, but here’s what’s up:
The ability to have others schedule mobile food vendors is a convenience at least, and a new form of business at most. It seemed worth it to delay the already-delayed release a bit more to make sure there was infrastructure in place to enable this.
What am I talking about?
The initial architecture for schedules was vendor-centric,...
July 2012
2 posts
Last Addition
After the feature debacle with Dreamhost, M5Hosting.com is the new home of FoodTruckYP.com and it looks like they are even more nerdy than I needed. That’s a good thing.
While demonstrating the public profile pages to MattyD of House of Siam on Wheels, I heard something from him that I’ve heard more than once… “Do we have to enter our schedules ourselves?”
First...
Steeping
Took a little break before launch to work on an educational project, which was good and highly educational for your FoodTruckYP developer!
While the notion of FoodTruckYP.com was conceived some time late in 2011, hard coding began in mid March 2012 and continued daily at a break-neck pace as a solo project, which meant the specs, architecture, and all testing were going on inside one head, with...
June 2012
2 posts
Release Plans for v0.9b
Found a few bugs in the version on the little tiny test server that have been fixed, a few things are still lingering, a few things that really should be properly finished off for this first roll-out will be, and then we’ll release it into the wild
Along the way I’ve bounced back and forth on how I’d like to monetize this exactly. The general plan is, it’s a...
Alpha Test about to begin...
So far there has been a grand total of 1.5 people testing out the web app, and a couple of bugs have been found.
Show stoppers preventing roll-out for alpha test
Re-schedule bug, sometimes schedules get munged a bit (this seems to be identified, a solid fix is in the works)
Front end maps. These are actually not totally working because of the lack of KML NetworkLink support in the google...
May 2012
6 posts
Today we are feature complete!
For the 0.9beta release, the plans were these.
Schedules
Recurring
One-off
Transparent cancellation (people can see when timeslots have been cancelled to avoid “You’re usually here” confusion)
Locations
Explicit location with draggable map marker
Nicknames for easy descriptive naming of unnamed places
Maps
KML as the preferred transport format
Javascript-based...
It's been running...
So for the curious, FoodTruckYP has actually been up and running for “public site tests” much like one might take a new food truck off external power and let it run self-contained while you make some food and drink and whatnot.
Guess what. We found some bugs here and there. That’s what that’s for.
Couple things got sorted out:
Cookies, SSL, and logging in and out...
The final countdown
There’s always something that crops up or otherwise makes itself known, that stops the final bits from coming together. The list of things that qualify has dwindled, and so we are approaching the release of FoodTruckYP 0.9 beta.
No, really.
It’s actually been up and running, a non-truck-owner has gone through the vendor signup process and found a few things that didn’t...
Pretty Much...
I’ve suggested that things move faster and faster as web app details come together, and this is true. Or it has been.
I mentioned previously that since I’m horribly late at this point, that I’m adding some additional features that I was going to roll out over time… time that has since gone by anyway, so why not? Horrible violation of the software engineering best...
Violating the rules of software engineering
In all of my years as a software engineer, programmer, white-box tester, etc, I have always found this statement and those like it to be silly:
Since we’re late, we have time to add more features.
I can’t even remember how many times I’ve heard marketing folks try to take a schedule slip as just such an opportunity, as if there wasn’t enough to do scrambling around...
End-to-End Site Functions for Test
Just a quick update… internally, these features work, which mean that last 20% should only take about… well, I’m not going to predict any times anymore:
Vendor signup
Add company
Add business(es) - the Who… trucks, carts, etc
Add place - these are Where the businesses conduct their business
Add schedule - the When
Edit above
Display public-facing profile pages for a...
April 2012
16 posts
28 Days Later...
Much code is working.
Had a great design review with Maria from Whisk on Wheels to go over some of the workflow for schedules as well as organizational stuff for menus, and a few useful tidbits from Nancy of OMiNinja about event scheduling.
I’ve seen a few more cases of confusion over location when trucks or an event with trucks are not so visible from the street. I’m not totally...
Three Weeks Late?!?
By now I suspect that some are doubting what has become to me (the lone developer of FoodTruckYP.com) a moral imperative, but rest assured, it is coming together nicely.
These three weeks have been highly-educational in two specific areas.
First, Events are Important
Well of course they are, but here in the South Bay Area (Silicon Valley, San Jose, whatever), there have been a few events in...
Events...
Not even done with this first roll-out, I’m keeping one eye on the next features, which will include support for events.
Before I go there, here’s how I view a “schedule” versus an “event.”
Schedule
A schedule is managed by a mobile vendor. That is, if it up to the vendor to declare a date and time and a place and then eventually end up there.
To support...
Almost. No, really
The past few days have seen development accelerating, which is sort of exciting. And tiring.
Location location location
I’ve mentioned this before, all mobile food vendors already know this, there is one simple fact in this arena: Your customers must know where you are and when. That’s the core business we’re pursuing here.
So yesterday, when I walked over to Raytheon in...
Two Weeks Late, What's Up?
Tomorrow will mark 2 full weeks since the line-in-the-sand release date of April 2, 2012 for FoodTruckYP.com.
What has that gotten us?
More Realistic Scheduling
As mention in two previous posts, there are some things about publishing the schedule of a moving target, for the consumption of mobile consumers, that can be a challenge. The “Edgewood Eats” scenario was a good one to...
How To Schedule on FoodTruckYP
A couple of discussions over the last couple of days have lead to a final couple of decisions about the entire notion of A Schedule in the world of FoodTruckYP.com.
Here it is. In Nerd-speak…
Schedule Entity
All schedule items are recurring, even if they recur one time only, ever. This is the schedule entity.
A schedule entity has a recurrence rule associated with it, along with a...
Schedules are fun and easy
There is a food truck gathering in Palo Alto, California called Edgewood Eats. There is no website for this event, there’s no Twitter account, only a Facebook page. The participating food trucks will typically tweet and mention on Facebook when they will actually participate, and the Facebook page tends to get a quick update the day before, which has been the first Tuesday of each month...
Productivity behind the scenes
A lot of stuff is now working, including some UI that some people have had a look at…
Today we have Twitter signon working, which will actually be used to connect a truck within FoodTruckYP.com to Twitter so that our robot can auto-post correct schedule info. The robot is actually the easy part, and it is one of the fundamental features around which the rest of this is being developed. ...
Information Rich Display
I’m designing the map and schedule list views at the moment.
I presently display markers with icons for the food trucks/carts/etc in question on the map, and as one might expect, tapping on the icons presents an InfoWindow (that’s what they’re called in the API) with a larger logo and location information (address, times).
That seems usable. Break the day into time slots,...
NoDeriv, some other things
Decided on the No Derivatives version of Creative Commons license (see previous post) as the default license for site content. This allows for use of schedules and location information, so that any blogger or newspaper site or whomever else can grab truck and cart data and use it in articles, posts, maps, calendars, etc, but they would have to leave the post information intact. I’d like...
Why Go Creative Commons?
To be honest, nobody has asked me about this, because I’m going to guess that nobody has really pondered this. It’s a little strange.
First, here are links to the two forms of CC license that are under consideration.
Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
The first form of the license is a little bit more restrictive, but first I’ll explain...
Late isn't so bad
I was kicking myself for missing my line-in-the-sand April 2 soft launch date, but now that I’ve spent the “bonus time” working on some UI and looking at the way a couple of other things work, and I spent the time looking at some server-side config stuff and getting that SSL cert (and more, I’ll leave the nerdy there), it turns out that this is not so bad.
In speaking...
Responsive UI
Since I’m already late with my launch date, I figured I may as well work on UI so that the site looks right on mobile and desktop devices. That is part of the selling point, afterall.
The splash page that has been there to date is not mobile-friendly, which I would imagine has raised at least one eyebrow (mine), but very very soon I’ll put up the responsive JQuery Mobile pages. ...
Servers, SSL Certs, and other stuff...
The initial testing home of FoodTruckYP.com was (and might still be) on a SliceHost, a cloud-based hosted fractional virtual server which would be sufficient for trying some things out. However, I learned over night that they are going to be operating on their server farm such that the host machine we would be on is going to be in a transitional state in a week. Perfect. So I just signed up for...
Slightly behind...
We’re late! Not good, but we’re not exactly sitting around watching paint dry (and when I say “we” you know I mean “me, myself, and I”).
Here’s where we’re at
Need to test Timezone handling, which is important if we want to support everybody with correct times. I grabbed a massaged version of the Olson database with zip code/city/state/latlong...
Asymptotic approach
It’s the eve of soft launch day and I have to say, this is interesting. In a tiring and nerve-wracking way.
The feature set goal for April 2 (no joke, that’s really the target day) is a subset of what the overall set of services will be, since it makes sense for a solo developer to factor the feature set into something manageable, and it makes sense to roll out features that make...
March 2012
1 post
First Post
A quick hello as we get a Tumblr blog added to the tools collection.
We’re covering all of the bases, with a Facebook page, a Google+ page, a Twitter account, and of course the website itself.
Anywhere else we need to be?
