Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

Came across a great blog post on performance in postgres on the Enfranchised Mind Blog. Great post - thanks for sharing it.

Alison, Macy & I stayed in the Northwest Passage room at the Riverside Lodge. It’s a great spot in Stevenson, WA, near Hood River, Oregon. Angus, who owns the facility is nice, efficient and has done a great job with the place. It consists of a small courtyard surrounded by cabins of various sizes. When I say cabins, I don’t mean the outhouse/no electricity kind, I mean the jacuzzi in your room, hot tub on the deck kind. This is a great getaway and won’t break the bank. For the room shown, we payed $90/night with a $10/night pet fee. Highly recommended. For those of you with dogs, the place is next to a small on-leash park which is perfect for doggie bathroom breaks.

We’re here for the holiday weekend, staying in a gorgeous cabin by the Columbia River in Stevenson, WA. It snowed last night and the view from our room is beautiful. No real plans for the weekend, just planning on exploring the area. Our cabin is dog-friendly and is huge. At only $90/night, it’s a steal. We have a kitchenette, indoor jacuzzi and shared access to an outdoor hot tub. More soon.

In the spirit of continuing to aggregate data that’s useful for consumers online, we’ve put together a post-christmas sales guide at Judy’s Book. The data are based on sale information printed in newspaper circulars. As someone who almost never buys the paper any more, putting this information online in an easily accessible form was terrific.

In an effort to create a lightweight way to launch it, Alex came up with an XML driven application that generates pages with navigation ready for deployment. This is fantastic because it allowed us to create the list without sucking up a lot of development cycles (which are always in short supply at any startup).

We held a small focus group at Judy’s Book on Friday last week. Nothing fancy, just invited a couple of people into our offices to use our deals site and see what they thought of it. In 30 minutes, we learned so much about how our product was perceived, we resolved to run sessions like this every 2-3 weeks. It’s one thing to monitor statistics on a page like click-through, time on page, exit rate etc, but it’s quite another to watch a real live user carry out simple tasks and see where they struggle.

One example, we aggregate deals from top online retailers and you can browse to them by going to a page we call “Deals by Store”. This seemed logical to us, but during our focus group, people were uncertain whether clicking on that link would take them off our site and they were unclear as to why we would have deals from other stores. While the notion between a deal site and an e-commerce site was clear to us, it wasn’t clear to these users.

There were tons of little examples like this, but if there’s one general point I would make it’s that we need to do a better job of making the consequences of actions clear to users. Most people I know are sophisticated web users and proceed with confidence, but the mainstream is not there yet.

Dave led the charge at Judy’s Book to compile this straightforward but useful Holiday Shipping Guide. It lists the shipping deadlines for the major retailers and provides links to their return policies. If you’re anything like me, you can’t stand shopping at malls during the holidays - “Lines! Lines! Lines! I hate Lines!” - and this definitely makes life easier. Enjoy.

The first of our free developer day features was released today. I love the new coupon finder - it’s a simple feature that achieves it’s purpose and no more. Very cool. How many times have you been checking out during an e-commerce transaction and seen the little box for a coupon code? I’ve often spent a few seconds searching for one on Google, but often can’t find one quickly enough and end up checking out for fear of losing my transaction or shopping cart. The coupon finder is designed to address this specific problem. Just type in a category or store name and see instantly if we have any coupon codes that would work for you.

It’s always tempting to throw away what you have and start from scratch when it comes to building a product, but that doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes, the quickest path to getting traction is to build and extend what you have in a coherent way. Knowing what to keep and what to reject is an art.

The phrase “it’s done” means different things to different people. From a product standpoint, it should mean - “it works as desired” not “I’m done working on it.” This is one of my pet peeves. It’s unfortunate how rare truly taking ownership and pushing a task to completion really is.

The process goal of checking off a box on a list when a task is complete is irrelevant. Something is done when the person you’re doing it for (everyone answers to somebody) is satisfied. End of story.

At Judy’s Book, we decided to implement a policy where once every two weeks we dedicate a day to allowing developers and designers to work on any feature they feel is interesting. We’ve committed to getting the feature up on the site so users can react to it. There’s a ton of creativity at the company and by providing a vehicle to surface that, I’m confident we’ll get some really cool ideas that would not have seen the light of day. Having a say in how the product evolves also promotes ownership and boosts morale. The real challenge will be in evaluating what works and what doesn’t and also in making sure that schedule pressure doesn’t impinge upon this time slot.