Don’t give up! The tab is back

Sorry for the slip up that led to a dust up but now it’s all fixed up. We were working on a new project (more on that in the next post) and we accidentally stepped on the “I’ve given up” tab.

We know folks keep track of given up goals for all kinds of reasons. Be assured, your given up goals never disappeared – just the tab that let you see them went missing. Now the tab is back, and you’ll be wondering, “How can 1 calorie taste so good?”

The Tab is back!

Lighten up

We try and keep our loyal readers abreast of what’s happening at the Co-op in our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and make things easier to use and maintain. Today’s announcement concerns a test drive of a new navigation bar (navbar) we are working on. The new navbar is faster loading, less tall, and we think, a bit easier on the eyes. In terms of functionality, it is all the same, this is mostly about how it looks and the performance when you request a page. Because the navbar is such a focal part of the page, this test is one you will almost certainly notice.

In our ongoing efforts to lose a few pounds . . .

We also wanted to tell you a bit more about the experiment, as it could prove a bit confusing as well. We’ll be introducing the new navbar through what is known as an A/B test. Half of the 43Things users will see the new navbar and the other half will see the same navbar we’ve been using for the last 9 months. This lets us measure the performance of each treatment and analyze the resorts accordingly. It also means you and a friend might not be seeing the same navbar at all. Or if you use one computer at work and another at home, the navbars you see may vary.

Thanks, in general, for being a part of the grand experiment that is 43 Things, and thanks specifically for bearing with us while we take the new navbar out for a spin.

All is change. All remains the same.

Hold on to your hats folks. In our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and simplify their operation we are “refactoring” a few things on the site related to goal adoption and goal counts (how many people are on a goal). Now if all goes smoothly, the net effect will be everything will function just as they did before, but with faster loading pages and less strain on the database. That ought to mean fewer “oops” pages. The change will be most evident on goals with lots of people and teams with lots of members.

Sounds great, right? So why the fuss? Well, because we are pretty much rerouting the oxygen intake for our dear 43Things the site (goal adoption) . We’ve tested the changes, double checked them, and we are feeling ready to roll them out. But if you see something go haywire in these 2 areas we’d love it if you let us know.

Site outage tonight!

We are going to take all the sites down tonight at 10 pm Pacific time to do some database maintenance. We are sorry for the inconvenience and apologize for not giving you more advance notice. The upshot of all this is that 43Things should be faster when we come back online 1 hour later.

Reboot

Our Load-balancer went all wonky and it took a bit of time to figure it out. It has now been reset, and things seem better. You should see no more “connection dropped” messages and all the edit links (etc.) should be working. Let us know if that is not the case, and thanks for flying with the Robots.

Meet the New Robot

Have you ever heard the story of the note placed in a bottle and thrown into the ocean, only to be discovered years later, thousands of miles away, by the very same person who wrote it? Well what about that movie, An Affair to Remember, where Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant fall in love and promise to meet again 6 months later. Now that I think about it, it is sort of like that Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves remake The Lake House, where to destined lovers are separated by the improbable barrier of time and tied together by a magic mailbox.

Oh, man, I think I’ve lost my train of thought . . . . did I tell you how HOT it is in Seattle today?

Back to the story: when we were getting started on 43Things.com we built an early prototype and shared it with a small group of folks. Some gave us one or two suggestions and one guy gave us a whole list of 43ideas for our new site. That’s where the “message in a bottle” part comes in. We loved the ideas (and we’ve followed through on some) and we promised to keep track of this list (we should have kept track of this guy as well). While no Cary Grant, we’d want to meet up later.

When we had a spot to fill on the Robot Co-op roster we posted the ad nationwide. We talked to a few folks and then it dawned on us – what about that guy who sent us that list almost 5 years ago. We sent him an email (that’s sort of like the magic mail box at Keanu’s Lake House). The guy we’d been waiting for, up there on the Empire States Building, had been using the site all along: user # 63 – member since December 12, 2004! Now that is old school! And when he got his email, he was like that guy who rediscovered his lost message in a bottle from years ago. Or something.

Did you know it is 101 degrees in Seattle today? I think it is affecting my metaphors. OKay – on with the announcement.

Ladies & Gentlemen: meet Joe Goldberg, the newest robot at the Robot Co-op.

Joe knows our site about as well as anyone outside of the company. In his first week he’s made all kinds of good suggestions. We feel lucky to have him. Joe will be working closely with Michelle on all things “front end” as well as helping to create new features and improve the performance of the old ones. He’s also diving into our metrics, fighting spam, and making the sites more awesome.

Thanks for joining us Joe! And sorry for the languid, sweaty, over-wrought, allusion filled, intro post! But it is REALLY HOT!

No more beer (for now)

In our ongoing quest to get swift and svelte, we are giving something up we really enjoy (and want to have back). Sort of like when I gave up drinking beer to lose 15 lbs (but picked it back up -more moderately – after I met my goal). Here we are talking about giving up those “related goal” links at the bottom of the page that tell you about related goals (take a look at the image if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

So long old friend. We will be together again soon.

Those little darlings were slowing down some of our most popular pages by as much as 12.5 seconds. So we are setting them aside to speed up these pages and we’ll bring them back when the back-end has been reworked to speed up that query. Thanks for the support on our diet! More to come.

Working the machines

We’ve made some recent hardware changes in our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and keep things more stable. We just finished commissioning 7 new boxes in our fleet, with a net increase of 2 servers.

We are now running on a total of 9 web servers with of 16GB of RAM per box.

New hardware is not all it takes to keep 43things.com running fast and stable, but it is part of the solution, and some of the hardware we replaced was 4 years old. We’ll update you on some of the network and software changes we are also making to deal with the increased usage of the site. Thanks for putting up with some of the site’s setbacks. We feel lucky to have a problem like too much content and too many heavy users – that is the sort of problem we never want to get rid of.

The Robot Co-op goes on a diet

I shouldn't have done that last super cheer, or the 3 ice creams.

It has been 5 years since The Robot Co-op got its start, and like some of us who work here, we have to admit we’ve gotten a bit out of shape over those years. We were trim and fit back when we first asked “What do you want to do with your life?” but we have put on a few extra pounds. It is a bit overdue that we consider going on a feature diet.

The goal of this diet is a sleeker and swifter Robot Co-op, with faster and more responsive web sites. And the extra calories we need to cut are site features (and whole sites) that are weighing us down. The team has trimmed down and we’ve cut out an “empty calorie” here and there but it’s time to get more radical in our efforts to make the sites fast and stable.

What should we give up on our new diet? Well the first thought we had was “Should do this”.

So long old friend.

It was a great idea: a suggestion box for the internet. But it didn’t proceed as we had planned, and ultimately we realized it had an ethical conundrum at the heart of its business model. Is it fair to host a suggestion forum for a company that didn’t ask to participate? It’s an interesting debate. One we never had to really consider because traffic to the site was never very meaningful. So why kill it? Saying goodbye frees up space in our brains. We have one less site to think about and more attention to put toward sites that people care about. We learned a lot from should do this, and don’t regret taking it on. But given what we learned, we decided to take it down last week. Whew, I’m feeling a bit more trim just typing that!

Next we thought, what feature did we build that users just never use? Maybe even a feature a lot of users actually hate! Well no feature was added to 43 Things that ever met with more hate and loathing than our one time pride and joy: SuperCheers.

We hate supercheers

We had big hopes. If someone would buy a teddy bear for a facebook friend, why not a SuperCheer to encourage a fellow 43Thingster? Well you all told us why, in about 400 angry emails denouncing SuperCheers and the wicked minds that concocted such a feature. OK good riddance.

In removing the feature we give up some revenue that supports the site but we get less hassle for not having to deal with it. We don’t have to maintain a secure server or deal with our credit card processor anymore and it simplifies things. We know about 3 of you out there actually like this feature and will miss it, and we appreciate you supporting the site. Sorry it is going away, but your sacrifice will help us slim down. The feature should be down later tonight.

You probably know it is hard to lose weight, so we could use your support. The goal is a site that is faster and more responsive, and Robots with more attention available toward what matters most. If you have suggestions for cuts you think we ought to make, let us know. We’ll give you an update next week on what else we are doing to get fit (sit ups, new servers, etc). See you at the gym.

Seeking: Front-End Focused Software Developer

The Robot Co-op is looking for a front-end focused Software Development Engineer who can drive the future of our web apps.

The Robot Co-op is a small software company located in Seattle, WA. In 2004, we created the Webby Award winning website 43Things.com. Today, over 2 Million people have made a list of their goals on our site and shared it with the world.

How work gets done at the Robot Co-op. - photo by Jason Sutter

The Robot Co-op has a history of technical innovation: five years ago we were one of the first commercial sites to use Ruby/Rails, we use external APIs like Amazon’s EC2, SimpleDB, S3, and Mechanical Turk to run our sites, and we’ve incorporated Facebook Connect and iPhone Apps into our web applications. We need you to push us further.

We offer great compensation and benefits and a very flexible work environment that prioritizes personal development and happiness over the drudge work of many desk jobs.

Required Skills:

• Minimum of 5 years professional software development experience in XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, and expertise in Javascript libraries like prototype.js
• Ruby on Rails expertise, 3 years professional experience desired
• Experience with developing browser-independent web apps used by the public
• Ability to collaborate with team members to produce page designs in CSS
• Familiar with Unix-based server environments
• Comfortable working in a loose, non-dogmatic, agile development environment

Desired Skills:

• Focus on writing maintainable code and automated tests
• Familiar with SQL, query optimization, and database tuning (especially in MySQL)
• Comfortable with OO design and data modeling
• Experience developing and consuming web-based APIs
• Excited about iPhone Apps, FacebookConnect, Amazon Web Services, and other emerging technologies

Bonus:

• Knowledge of Flash/ActionScript

While all the acronyms matter, a personality fit is also important. We work closely together, brainstorm projects and solutions as a team, and we do a lot of talking about ideas and technologies. We will consider remote candidates but require a trial contract to make sure things work well for both parties. Relocating candidates are also welcome and we can help with relocation expenses. Sorry, we have no H1-B Visas.

To start the conversation, send us a well crafted cover letter/email along with a relevant resume.

Email: jobs@robotcoop.com