Well, I’ll finally have time to write on my blog again. As of Friday, I’ve left development on TipDish.

There were many reasons for my decision to leave the group, which I won’t go into in depth here. Very simply, the project was going in a direction that I simply did not agree with, so I felt it better to be on my way than to start a firestorm of in-fighting.

Despite my eventual departure from the project, I still very much consider it a worthwhile experience. I learned alot from it and not just on the programming side of things.

I learned the crucial importance of starting a company with people you know and trust. I don’t mean to speak ill of Startup Weekend; I believe the ideal of the event is a noble one. Unfortunately, the practical reality is that, due to the nature of Startup Weekend, the group of people you end up working with is largely random. Many of the people are great; inevitably some will be untrustworthy, unreliable, or down-right trouble-makers. You also have no control of the composition of the group, so it’s possible to end up like we did, with only a handful of people with the technical expertise required to pull something like this off, and a large group of by-standers.

I learned the demands of a project this size, the technical requirements and some of the major speed-bumps and potholes along the way.

I learned the importance of a clearly defined objective and a good plan to see it into fruition. Even as I was making my exit from TipDish there were still major areas of concern that had not been planned or in some cases even thought about.

And of course, I learned Rails. You can read all the books, blogs, tutorials, and articles, listen to all the podcasts and screencasts, etc., but until you actually work on a bona fide application, it never truly clicks. I don’t pretend to have it all down even at this point, but I am leaps and bounds ahead of where I was previous to Startup Weekend.

So, all in all, it was a good experience. Part of me is sad to leave the project, but part of me is also relieved beyond measure. And with that, I close the chapter on TipDish.

It’s been a significant length of time since I last posted, and I’ve been feeling really bad about that. I’ve become so bogged down lately, I barely have time to breathe, but I figured what readers I have deserve at least a moment of my time.

TipDish has been consuming the majority of my free time. We’ve just deployed an alpha pre-alpha version. Things are starting to come together and that’s a refreshing turn of events. For those who’ve missed my previous posts, TipDish is the startup that was founded at this year’s Startup Weekend Houston. The purpose of TipDish is to connect bloggers and other social media authors with latest ‘dish’ from PR and marketing firms. The service is free for ‘dishers’ to join, but comes at a cost to ‘tippers’, the PR and marketing firms. While it’s chief purpose is to provide a service to these firms, we believe there’s great value in it for the bloggers and social media others who choose to list with us. They’ll have access to up-to-the-minute news in the industries they choose and have interest in. Additionally, all communication will take place through our site, which means there will be no spam and individuals can opt out at any time from receiving future ‘tips’. Alot of the founders of TipDish are bloggers, as well, and we want to ensure that their interests will be served at every turn.

Anyways, I’ve got some things I’ve been itching to write about. Developing TipDish has expanded my knowledge of Rails in leaps and bounds. So, the moment I get a chance, I’ll be posting some of those learning experiences here. For the moment, though, my time is up.

Just noticed the group shot of the Startup Weekend Houston team, so I decided to rip it off and post it on my blog (evil laugh). If anyone cares, I’m the one in the back left, stealing the limelight as usual.

Tomorrow the team’s meeting over at the Stag’s Head Pub again. We’ll be discussing a timeline for TipDish and next steps to get it out the door. It’ll be good to see everyone again. It’s amazing how close you grow to people in such a short amount of time with things like this.

Nothing else new to report, I’m afraid, but I’m sure I’ll have alot more to say tomorrow.

I was really sick by Sunday, so when Startup Weekend Houston wrapped up. I just went home and went to bed. Hence, why I haven’t posted about it, yet. But I figured it was about time for me to go ahead and write a post about how the weekend ended.

Sunday brought with it a world of problems. Even Sunday, we were still getting new wireframes and concepts, some of which required changes to the existing code. The template for our site was still going through design changes even up to 8pm Sunday.

Around noon, the Devs got some help, though, in form of two remote Rails developers, Jake and Brian. Brian set to work on the dashboard pages, but unfortunately didn’t get very far. Jake set up our server and helped us deploy TipDish to a subdomain so we could all view it live. Thanks Jake! Don’t know what we would have done without you.

I on the other hand got distracted by other issues. A few people couldn’t checkout from our subversion respository, which oddly enough eventually corrected itself, but not until I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out. Then, my working copy of TipDish got corrupted somehow, to the point where I couldn’t even boot webrick. Eventually, I gave up on trying to troubleshoot it and just removed the directory and checked it out again, which worked, but I lost some of what I had worked on.

Late into the evening, it became apparent that our template was simply unmanageable. I had noticed problems in it, but figured it could always be fixed after the weekend when we would have more time. Not so. Erica and Kelsey spent quite a while fixing the version of the template on our live domain. But, even now, no work has been done on the app’s version.

Needless to say, TipDish did not launch Sunday night, which was a little disappointing. Yet, an entire web app is a tall order for one weekend, and TipDish is a rather complex web app, making it an even taller order.

There is good news, though, many in the group committed to stay on the project, including myself. We plan to powwow sometime this week to get our bearings and see where we’re at. I also just found out that we’ll most likely be presenting at the 5th Annual Information Technology and Web 2.0 Venture Forum on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Which of course means that TipDish will have to launch before November 8th. I’d like to see it happen sooner than that, though, and I think it’s entirely possible that it could launch within 2 weeks.

In the meantime, anyone can signup for info at TipDish.com. I’ll be posting updates here, of course, and there’s always the Startup Weekend Houston blog. Actually, if I’m not mistaken, TipDish should be getting its own blog too, but I’ll have to get back to everyone on that.