55: The Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster

The Art of Product

Derrick is in Washington for ElixirConf. Like Elixir, he is becoming more comfortable with stability, as opposed to constant churn and new stuff all the time. He knows you have to show restraint to try and not solve every problem. While at the conference, Derrick wants to make connections with people and hopes Level will one day be a good use case example for the Elixir community.

Ben is discovering that startups are not easy. There are a lot of ups and downs. While other people were enjoying Labor Day, Ben was actually being a boss and getting work done. He may not have worked on the highest priority, but on a task that was satisfying to work on.

Today’s Topics Include:

• Derrick has been keeping up his dev journal for Level by chronicling stories about the day-to-day building process; keeps him focused
• For his journal, Derrick is using Svbtle, which offers a beta option to enable SSL for secure custom domains
• Derrick is experimenting with newer Web platform functionality and built a custom element for Level to inject custom HTML and send push notifications
• Ben was planning to pair using the Tuple app, but a bunch of stuff broke
• Highs and lows with Tuple have been crazy; the lows make Ben wonder if it is ever going to work
• Derrick tried using Level with someone else and everything seemed confusing; feel good about small wins, but rough spots can be difficult
• Still a lot to do with Tuple, but Ben is making forward progress; keyboard support and other features have been merged - becoming a working app
• Ben has some performance and latency leads for Tuple that are promising
• Tuple continues to be tested inside and outside of Ben’s team to address variables

Links and resources:

Derrick Reimer Website
Derrick Reimer on Twitter
Ben Orenstein Website
Ben Orenstein on Twitter
Level
The Level Journal
Tuple
ElixirConf
RubyConf
Heroku
Richard Feldman
Svbtle