Blogging seems to have fallen down on the list of things I need to do, so as a result it has been a while since I’ve posted anything. One of the things I’ve been working on instead of keeping the interweb buzzing with my keen insight and immaculate prose is working on a new website. It has been around for a while, but my cohorts and I finally got around to upgrading the site to a place which we think is good enough to tell the world.
YupNope.com is another one of these Web2.0, ajaxy, opinion sites. Kind of like digg.com or reddit.com. We don’t anticipate killing off those leaders, but when I came up with the idea for the site (on a bus at 7am in the morning last summer), my main complaint with existing sites like YupNope was the complexity. I just wanted a simple site, where I could go, add something to the site and tell the world what I thought about it. I didn’t want to debate my feelings or read through mountains of inane comments on the subject. I just wanted to write something down and vote yup or nope on it. That’s it. Nothing more. And so, YupNope was born.
As it turns out YupNope served a greater purpose then getting us millions of dollars in investment and launching my own personal internet celebrity status into the stratosphere. Although I’m not discounting those things happening in the future, yupnope.com has already served a really good purpose. I’ve been involved in a startup company since 2006 called Starscale Inc.. It has been a part time thing for all the co-founders up until about two months ago when we took a web development contract that I’m working full time on (and getting paid!). Over the last three years, Starscale has built a huge set of code libraries based on the over 40 combined years of industry experience that we have. During that process, we needed a way to test the infrastructure and also explore what was missing. The only thing that could really do that was a real app. That’s where YupNope came in. A simple concept where we wouldn’t have to spend much time on figuring out _what_ the app had to do and could spend most of our time on _how_ we would implement the application in the most efficient, robust and scalable way. And it worked. Aside from the actual code that went into YupNope, we added tons of code to our libraries to do many many things that we hadn’t anticipated a need for. We spent time optimizing javascript, optimizing server side html generation, writing libraries to handle json in an efficient manner and much much more that applied not only to web application development, but to server side development in general.
So we hope YupNope becomes a raving internet success. In fact, that is truly the only way to test the robustness and scalability of Starscale’s platform. But even if no one ends up using the site, it has already earned its keep and to us it is a success.
If you’ve got an opinion, you’ve got YupNope.