The startup CTO/COO

So, these web ventures sure do a good job of using up all the slack time, which is why posting here has been normally infrequent.

Perhaps I’ll write a bit here about just what’s going on in Scouta for me and just what sorts of things I end up working on day to day wearing my two hats, technical and operations.

Here’s kind of a list off the top of my head:
Tech

• Manage new development. That means:

• getting some consensus amongst the team about features we need to do next;
• trying to pick stuff that is doable so things get moving, avoiding the really hard stuff or invisible stuff;
• working out what we can do later;
• keeping focus in the team on the next goals;
• trying not to get sidetracked by things that don’t really matter;
• keeping development linked to the community/member/customer need;
• Try and maintain a technical vision that is longer than a few weeks away;
• Test things before release and encourage the rest of the team to do that too;
• Be aware of standards and technologies out there; work out if they are important and need to be incorporated;
• Work with industry and standards bodies (like APML working group)

Operations

• Make sure lots of things happen, like:

• Backups
• Servers get paid for
• Stats are collected
• Logfiles are kept
• DBs are backed up/replicated
• Automated email logs are scanned
• Check site security

• Check things like:

• Can people join up?
• Are outgoing emails working
• Are servers up
• Are response times reasonable

Manage:

• setup and config of new servers
• relationships

Wow, that’s enough. That explains why i’m busy :-)

Actually, I don’t do all of this on a daily basis and I do get to dip into the code itself a fair bit. At the moment I’m doing a lot of work on Scouta’s incoming and outgoing RSS. Metadata. It is all about metadata.

Scouta to Twitter: “G’Day World”

Given all the current Twitter madness and the fact they have a nice easy API, it was time to get Scouta talking to twitter.

And a couple of hours later it was done.

So, now, once in a while, currently hourly, Scouta picks a random newly-added fave media item and sends a link to twitter.

You can follow scouta on twitter to see the updates there.
And one of the first things it posted to twitter was a newly added podcast interview that Rich and I just did for Cameron Reilly’s G-Day World podcast.  As it should be :-)

Scouta launched!

We’ve launched scouta.com, our new online video and audio recommendation service.  Please go over and take a look and join up.  Members have more fun!

It was a big push to the launch and then I had a scheduled, booked holiday at Rottnest Island for a few days.  So…  I called and occasionally dared to go online via the mobile at £7.50 per MB (thanks T-mobile.. you’d think they were hand-crafting each bit at a price like that)

There’s been a lot of blog and press coverage..  See a summary on the Scouta blog.

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