18 Days: Closing In On Group

As I mentioned, there are two key parts of Groupthink - group and think. For the past few days, I've been working mostly on group and I wish I could say I was done with it, but I'm not. The good news (I hope) is that group is harder than think.

And what's group? Group is the support for sharing and collaboration that underlies the data. It's the infrastructure I need to support the actual data and user interface. I'm on my third implementation and I might tweak it a little more after a discussion with Mike Koss today. I think I'm on the right track now, but Mike asked some good, tough questions and I'm going to take some time and think about it a bit more and make sure I'm not missing the boat*.

Similarly, over the last two weeks, I've had a lot of really good discussions with outside advisors and gotten some great advice. Every time I have a meeting, I learn about more things that I don't know! Sometimes it's daunting, but I wouldn't have it any other way. As Jamie Riche explained at Wednesday's Seattle Tech Startups meeting, it's better to learn the things that you don't know. And it's why I try to listen as much as I can in these meetings (though I know I also spend a lot of time explaining).

To everyone who's been giving me advice, thanks again.

[* One thing that's a bit frustrating about Google App Engine is the inability to run reasonable performance tests on database operations. When I have multiple ways of doing something with big differences in schemas and/or queries, I'd like to be able to have a definitive way of telling which way is more performant, and, basically, I can't. So, figuring things like this out means thinking hard.]