A week ago, something very interesting happened.  Tony, who works with/for A Beautiful Question, a design and development company owned and operator by my long time friend James Welsh, came down stairs from the office they rent here in my building and started asking questions about The Beer Repository.

If you aren’t familiar with The Beer Repository, let me bring you up to speed.  A couple of years ago when I was finally starting to feel comfortable with development and the tools I was using at the time, I started looking for a project that I could call my own.  Around that time I was starting to dig deeper into craft beer.  Craft beer, to make it simple, it mostly from smaller breweries or microbreweries and, in my opinion, is on the more flavorful side of beer.  Smaller batches means breweries are willing to try different things and so you get an amazing array of color, taste, and aroma that will make you wonder why you ever bothered with anything else.

So I had this new love for craft beer and a goal to start trying everything.  I started keeping a journal of what I was drinking because I quickly realized that I couldn’t remember what I liked.  Then I thought maybe other people were having this problem or were having a hard time discovering new beer.  I thought about creating some kind of online community that would be a collection of beer journals, that could be shared with the world.  It wasn’t a totally unique idea, but it sounded fun and seemed like a good project to pursue.  And so, The Beer Repository was born.  I set to work hammering out how it was all going to work.  I made the decision to try and incorporate Twitter; to actually make it the backbone of the whole project.  The idea was that people could post short reviews through twitter from wherever they were, and the site would grab those and add them.

I ended up spending most of my time on the project working out the interaction between the two systems and learning a lot in the process.  Unfortunately, despite the work I put in, it did not payoff.  What I thought would be easy and convenient wasn’t and the site never really got used.  I continued to post reviews, hoping people would catch on, but it never did.  So after months of hard work, I let it sit.  Eventually, Twitter made changes to their system and it now currently does not work.  You can still see the past reviews that were submitted, but no one can submit new reviews and no one has informed me as such.

While this is very disappointing, it wasn’t unexpected.  Web startups have an insane failure rate, because so many are launched everyday.  More often than not, it isn’t what your site does, but who promotes it that matters, as is the case in life.  Despite its failure, I still was able to get a lot out of the project.  I got to know jQuery better.  I learned how OAuth works and more importantly the perils of debugging it.  I learned a lot about using services.  The key is I learned something from it, it wasn’t all for nothing.

Flash forward to my discussion with Tony.  He started asking me some interesting questions and throwing out some very interesting ideas.  This got me thinking about the project in a completely different way and just like before, presented an opportunity to learn some new things and sharpen my knowledge of Rails.  I have started the very early phases of planning by just writing down every idea I could have, and using The Rspec Book, creating some stories that could potentially make up a first release.  I am determined to follow Behavior Driven Development with this project so I can really learn how to use it from the start of a project, instead of in the middle of one, which has been a disaster.

My other hope is that I won’t do it alone.  I enjoy working on a team when it comes to development, especially if that means there is someone handling design, which is not one of my strong abilities.  Working on my current project for work and The Beer Repository have been difficult and at times I just had to stop because I wasn’t making progress and just banging away at it wasn’t helping at all.  Its been nice to occasionally bounce ideas of the guys at ABQ, but it is different when someone actually has a stake in a project.  We will see what happens.

Hopefully, all of this results in a site that people want to use and more importantly want to tell their friends about.  I think I lost sight of a lot of things with the first version, including what people want out of it versus what I wanted out of it.  Also, I learned that despite how easy I think I am making it, it might not translate that way.  I think the Twitter integration was an interesting idea that in the end did not do enough to enhance the user’s experience to justify all the trouble I went through to set it up and maintain it.  This time I will focus on making a site for everyone else first, and myself second.  I still want it to be something I would want to use everyday, but it is more important that everyone else wants to use it everyday.

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