Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

Gigi is an avid traveler (really)

We are very happy today. A new member joins the team: Gisella Borja. Gisella (a.k.a. Gigi) joins the team as CHO — Chief Handy-woman Officer. Many start-ups have this position and LetMeGo is no exception. As such, Gigi will be in charge of doing a little bit of everything; from customer service to finance to quality assurance to etc., etc., etc.

Gigi will be working intensively from the LetMeGo Immersion place, too (although she won’t be working 24×7 or staying overnight).

Welcome to the team Gigi! Getting LetMeGo to be profitable is going to be a wild, fun ride.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. You can follow Gigi on Twitter at @gigiborja.

Good news! Yet another scope of the Merrcury Engine (the software behind the soon-to-be-released LetMeGo) is ready: The Charrly Scope. This scope is responsible for all the email campaigns we will send to our existing users. Among its many features, there is one I love: It automatically includes an opt-out link at the very top of every marketing message we send.

We decided to develop an in-house system instead of using an external one (i.e. Constant Contact) for several reasons:

• To guarantee real-time opt-outs
• To be able to perform complex segmentation
• Because it was easy

It took me around two weeks of immersion time (equivalent to five or six weeks of regular work) to code it using test driven development. During that time, I also recorded the automated-user test cases via Selenium. The design of the user interfaces was created by Maestro. Obviously, the entire team helped me as I am still re-learning to code. Thank you guys!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Here is the current status of all the subsystems and scopes required for our full beta release:

Scope Progress
Scope	Status
Web Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Morrison Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Cockerr Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Hendrrix Scope	Ready for Beta!
Sinatrra Scope	55.34% of QA for Beta*
Arrmstrong Scope	95% of Coding for Beta
Rrose Scope	Ready for Beta!
Charrly Scope	Ready for Beta!
Mozarrt Scope	Alpha Ready
Mastrropiero Scope	40% of Coding for Beta
Kubrrick Scope	50% of Coding for Beta
Brrown Scope	25% of Coding for Beta
Marrley Scope	100% of UI Design
Waterrs Scope	25% of Coding for Beta

(*) Based on Lucho’s estimate

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but I am sharing this news anyway. Instead of hosting the Merrcury Engine with old-time partner Rackspace, we have decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS).

A few months ago Andres and the team of Torrenegra Internet Solutions completed the setup of the Merrcury Engine over at AWS. We have three separate environments there: development (our coding playground), staging (where we test everything before it goes live), and production (the actual site that you will soon be able to experience).

By the way, Torrenegra Internet Solutions is a company I founded back in 2000. They specialize in systems administration and 24×7 monitoring of enterprise-level web applications. They already administer several large web sites in AWS. If you need their services, please ask for Gisella, the best account manager ever, and tell her that I sent you.

Alexander Torrenegra

Why? Because I am a cruel, heartless Boss (yes I capitalized ‘B’)!

No, that is not true. The reason is because we use Linux and Mac OS in our laptops (Well… we do have one Windows machine, but we are about to shut it down.)

Henry, German, Nicolas, and Andres have Ubuntu installed on their laptops, while Maestro and I have Macs. The “one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other-thing” is Lucho’s laptop. It has Windows XP installed. Nevertheless, he will be switching to Mac right after the LetMeGo Immersion ends.

The software we are developing is also Windows-free. We will be hosting LetMeGo.com in Linux RedHat using Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

Sorry Billy. I appreciate you a lot, but Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL, and a few other Microsoft tools get on my nerves (…and not because of their price).

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Actually, we do have another Windows machine in here; the one we use to transmit to Ustream the video of the LetMeGo Immersion webcam. We think that Windows is great for tasks, like this, that require little or no interaction with the user. We need to restart that machine almost every day, though, as it stops working without touching it.

This is the image I wanted to appear whenever a user got a 500 error message. The team didn't like it, though . Oh well. A different one will be used. Hopefully, you will never get to see it.

The Merrcury Engine (the software behind LetMeGo) is composed of several subsystems (see details). Three of these subsystems are known as the “communication subsystems”. They are in charge of all of the interactions we have with our customers. I recently blogged about the completion of the Morrison subsystem (email interactions) and the Cockerr subsystem (human interaction via tickets). Today, we are happy because the Web subsystem (the only one without a funny name) has reached beta stage, too.

The Web subsystem is in charge of allowing our users to interact with our business via the web (obviously). Needless to say, this is how our customers will interact with us most of the time. The Web subsystem does not include any business logic (almost). However, it sits in the middle, between the user and the subsystems that handle the business logic.

The Web subsystem of Merrcury includes many neat features. Some of them are the following:

• A lot of AJAX, courtesy of jQuery, mostly.
• Whenever users see a date and time in our site, it will be render using the time zone of the computer.
• ACL-based permissions, courtesy of CakePHP.
• Friendly forms.
• Automatic browser check that displays alerts whenever the browser being used hasn’t been tested with the site.
• Every time a signed-in user gets a 500 error message, a ticket will be opened automatically, so that we can personally apologize for the issue.
• As with the Cockerr and Morrison subsystems, the Web subsystem is capable of full internationalization.
• And much more!

Pretty much every member of the team helped in the coding and QA of the Web subsystem (with the exception of myself, your dear author of these fine blog posts.) Thank you guys!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Here is the current status of all the subsystems and scopes required for our full beta release:

Scope Progress
Scope	Status
Web Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Morrison Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Cockerr Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Hendrrix Scope	Ready for Beta!
Sinatrra Scope	15% of QA for Beta
Arrmstrong Scope	80% of Coding for Beta
Rrose Scope	Ready for Beta!
Charrly Scope	15% of Coding for Beta
Mozarrt Scope	Alpha Ready
Mastrropiero Scope	25% of Coding for Beta
Kubrrick Scope	45% of Coding for Beta
Brrown Scope	15% of Coding for Beta
Marrley Scope	100% of UI Design
Waterrs Scope	5% of Coding for Beta

What does the development team of LetMeGo do when they relax? We travel! We just came back from a short break from the LetMeGo Immersion. It was only four days long, but each one of us enjoyed it a lot

Lucho visited the Colombian Coffee-Growers Axis (a.k.a. “Eje Cafetero”) and practiced extreme sports.

Andres visited Bucaramanga, Colombia and the Chicamocha National Park.

Henry visited Chinauta, Cundinamarca with his wife and kids.

German ate tasty longaniza with Colombian wine in Sutamarchan, Boyaca.

And I, Alex, traveled to the Brazilian Amazon to fish for piranhas.

I will soon upload pics of my trip. For now I leave you with a great shot taken by Lucho while paragliding:

Lucho paragliding over Ansermanuevo, Colombia.

Sneak peak of our email message template. // Update 1: Some of you asked if the content of this screenshot was real. This is my answer: If you seriously thought that the content of the email would be used, the first thing you should do is run away from me! You shouldn't be asking me questions, as I may be a scammer and I may end up stealing money from you! Duh.

Hello!

The Merrcury Engine, the software that will power LetMeGo, is closer and closer to completion. Today, one of its main communication components, the Morrison subsystem, has reached beta stage. The Morrison subsystem handles all the automatic email exchanges between LetMeGo and its users.

Some of its features include:

• Full internationalization capabilities
• Secured and encrypted opt in/out management
• Automatic conversion of CSS (cascade style sheets) into embedded HTML styles that allows the proper rendering of our messages in most email platforms
• Automatic creation of plain-text versions out of the HTML versions of our messages
• Queues and priorities
• Automatic insertion of tracking codes for marketing campaigns
• And much more!

The Morrison subsystem was masterminded by Lucho. He implemented most of the code. Maestro, of course, created the awesome design of our email templates. Henry and Nicolas also helped significantly, towards the end, in writing the remaining code and tests required to reach Beta. Thank you guys!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. Here is the current status of all the subsystems and scopes required for our full beta release:

Scope Progress
Scope	Status
Web Subsystem	70% of Coding for Beta
Morrison Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Cockerr Subsystem	Ready for Beta!
Hendrrix Scope	Ready for Beta!
Sinatrra Scope	95% of Coding for Beta
Arrmstrong Scope	60% of Coding for Beta
Rrose Scope	60% of Coding for Beta
Charrly Scope	10% of Coding for Beta
Mozarrt Scope	Alpha Ready
Mastrropiero Scope	25% of Coding for Beta
Kubrrick Scope	35% of Coding for Beta
Brrown Scope	5% of Coding for Beta
Marrley Scope	100% of UI Design
Waterrs Scope	100% of Requirements