Weeks 19 and 20 - Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working
First of all, apologies for the absence of last week's weekly update. We've been neck deep in knocking out bugs and payments and polishing our product and one thing led to another and it was already Friday, so we decided to roll out a combined report this week.
Payments We've made some stellar progress with integrating payments into Gameplan. What we're especially proud of is that we've made paying a very unobtrusive part of the entire Gameplan experience. A user can essentially sign up on Gameplan, create an entire league and decide to pay us once he sees how much time Gameplan has saved him. Paying us is not a pre-requisite for a user to use Gameplan (whatever the size of the league/tournament) and we think that will encourage a lot more people to give it a spin. Integrating with Paypal has been a bitter-sweet experience. Since we aren't doing recurring payments and thanks to the excellent Railscasts, we have a tested (with Cucumber and Shoulda) payments system built into Gameplan, but running tests on Paypal's Sandbox is still a nightmare-ish scenario. If ever there was a service ripe for creative destruction, it is Paypal. But I digress.
User Interface Polish and Tweaks Andy and I have also been hard at work ironing out irritants and glitches in the user interface to make it as seamless as possible. We've been heavily influenced by the Blank Slate Design Pattern - thus making sure that users are not lost when they sign up. Funnily enough, while we were in the process of making these changes we bumped into a friendly Gameplan user at the Web.Sg meetup and he mentioned to us that once he signed up, he wasn't sure what the difference between a league and a cup was - and this really re-affirmed our decision to spend time improving our message and making it as less confusing as possible.
Andy's also making some massive improvements to our homepage, so watch that space!
Remote Working Andy's away in the UK for a month so we're working remotely this month. Luckily most of the hard engineering problems have been solved and so working remote looks like it will work out since most of the tasks that we have to do are related to marketing and responding to bugs and user feedback. While this will be the longest period the Gameplan founders will be split up since the first of April, it will be an interesting experiment to see how we work during this month. We've also launched an internal project codenamed S10K which both of us will be working on - more details on that soon!
Weeks 19 and 20 Combined Stats: 11 issues closed. 5 new features adding up to a current total of 99. 5,134 lines of code and 12,317 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.4.
