Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

I am writing this blog entry (not posting it, though) as I fly to Hong Kong to start a small business trip to China. The objective of my trip is to learn about the lodging industry in Asia and, primarily in China. We want to make sure that LetMeGo and the engine behind it (Merrcury) will have what it takes to easily release a Chinese version of it. Why China? The Chinese market and US market are as different as it gets. If the Merrcury Engine is flexible enough to work in the United States and in China simultaneously, it will be flexible enough to work anywhere else (or at least I hope so). China also intrigues me. Ebay, PayPal, Yahoo and many other successful Internet companies in the US have failed to make it in China. I look forward to learn as much as I can to avoid this from happening to LetMeGo.

The trip starts in Hong Kong. I will then visit Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, and then Shanghai. I will be meeting Chinese web entrepreneurs along the way. I have also scheduled meetings with executives of two major travel portals in China: Ctrip and Elong.

While on the flight, I just finished the documentation of use cases and user interfaces of the billing scope of the Merrcury Engine: the Waterrs Scope. This system will take care of tracking the commissions that lodgings will pay LetMeGo in exchange for the bookings that we get for them. Coming up with the business logic was tricky: accounting systems aren’t too complex to build but, for most people, they don’t make a lot of sense. I wanted to create something that was friendly and easy to understand. I had to rewrite some use cases several times, but I am happy with the result. Travelers will never get to see this interface. It will only be experienced by the staff of lodgings.

On a similar note, Maestro just completed the creation of the wireframes and screenshots of the Kubrrick Scope. The objective of this scope is secret for now and we will only make it public when we go live. All I can say for now is that Maestro, as usual, did a great job fitting a lot of useful information in a very small space and in a beautiful manner. Thank you Maestro!

Alexander Torrenegra

In some of my previous posts I have written about scopes and subsystems. During the past month or so, I invested most of my time writing the use cases for two scopes that had to be split into four (Kubrrick and Waterrs were split into Kubrrick and Brrown, and Marrley and Waterrs respectively). Because all of this can easily become very confusing, today I decided to provide a general explanation of the architecture of LetMeGo.

LetMeGo.com is going to be powered by the Merrcury Engine. That is what we call the software we are writing. The Merrcury Engine has an object and service oriented architecture. Instead of using words, I will allow the next diagram to speak by itself. Please click on it to see the full size version:

For those of you familiarized with web architecture, you may be interested to know that this schema has one innovation over the status quo of web architecture. Our architecture is splitting the major models of the engine into separate subsystems, thus achieving low coupling. A few weeks ago at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC, I attended the presentation “Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches“. The speaker was Cal Henderson, head of engineering for Flickr. I had the opportunity of discussing our architectural approach with him. He said that, to the best of his knowledge, nobody had taken a similar approach. Will it work? As with many other aspects of our project, only time will tell. We are very confident, though.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. As you can see, we are using names of artists, primarily musicians, to name the subsystems. The only requisite is to have an “r” on the name that we can convert into double “r”.

Around six weeks ago I wrote about the RRápido methodology. I had presented RRápido internally (to the Torrenegra Labs) two weeks prior. On the version of RRápido I presented, we had documented that the developer was in charge of writing the test case matrix. The test case matrix is a type of traceability matrix that we create for each use case. The test case matrix determines which test cases (columns) will be testing which triggers and extensions (rows). On that meeting German made a suggestion. “I think the product developer should write, or at least suggest, how the test case matrix should look like for each use case”, he said. He argued that by doing that, the developer would be less anxious and, thus, more productive. I took note of the suggestion, applied to the RRápido methodology, and then released RRápido to the public.

Only last week, though, is that I, as product developer, got to experience this tip first hand. All I can say is that it works great! On top of German’s prediction, it also offers an additional advantage: It is a wonderful reality check. When the product developer creates the test case matrices, it is forced to think how something should be tested in the browser. In some cases, as it happened to me last week, it will drive the product developer to reconsider how some of the triggers and extensions were born. Creating a test case matrix is very quick (five to ten minutes) and it can save hours and days of work to the developers. Why? Because they would have been the ones finding the errors while coding, or, even worst, when recording the Selenium test cases. Changing the documentation at this stage is doable, but, most of the times, expensive in terms of money and time.

Thank you German for the idea!

Omar Duque, my long-time friend, will be joining our team next Tuesday. He will become the sixth member of LetMeGo. Omar comes from Voice123, where he worked as Project Manager and a Product Developer for almost three years. With Omar joining the team, we expect to speed up the release of LetMeGo by around two months.

Welcome to the team Omar!!!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Several weeks passed since my last blog entry. The reason: I had a very busy schedule. I attended Web 2.0 Expo New York and traveled to Bogota for a week to work with Henry, Maestro, German, and Lucho. I had a blast at both places. At Web 2.0 Expo, not only did I get many great ideas for LetMeGo, but I also met many interesting people. Some of them include Gregg Brockway, founder of Hotwire.com and TripIt.com; Chinedu Echeruo, founder of HopStop.com and Tripology.com; Nate Westheimer, founder of BricaBox.com; David Rose, from Rose Tech Ventures; etc. There were plenty of wonderful conversations about the future of the travel industry and Silicon Broadway (the new name for Silicon Alley). Among the things that I discovered, it seems nobody has thought of the business model that we are implementing in LetMeGo. I am keeping my fingers crossed.