Authentication and Planning

I surprised myself by deciding to rewrite authentication again. I'm almost done with version 3, which is a complete rewrite instead of a modification to the existing code, like version 2 was, and it's taken me longer than the first two versions combined. But, I feel it's much stronger the way I'm doing it and some of the bugs I had in item-level authentication should just vanish. After finishing the 2nd version, I had this nagging feeling that it still wasn't right. Basically, my design was based on the need to work around a limitation in Google App Engine -- the lack of proper relationships between tables (combined with wanting to reduce the number of database queries). I spent some time thinking about it and realized a simpler, more elegant way to avoid the limitations which got me a much better data structure and thus, much better code. I wish I'd thought of it in the first place! But that's the way it is sometimes -- I had to learn from my mistakes.

On a different topic, yesterday I mentioned that I went to the AoA pitch clinic. I've decided that I'm going to spend at least an hour a day working on business planning, my pitch to potential investors, and related items. But, I'm not going to blog about it, except perhaps to indicate how much time I spend on it. The reason for this is that I want to make absolutely sure that nothing written on this blog could be construed as anything resembling a public offering to invest in Groupthink. I will, however, think about writing some blog posts about the process after it's all over.