New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India: The sweet smell of shipping code!

Last month and half have been incredibly busy for me. We were in the endgame for shipping the alpha version of People Aggregator, which is a highly extensible social networking platform. The last few weeks of a release cycle are at least as important as the previous 6 months of development. Several months and years of progress can go to waste if the team loses steam during the end game. I am happy and proud to say that the People Aggregator team truly switched into top gear over the last 2 weeks. The QA team was putting intense pressure and three figure bug counts were giving me sleepless nights! But in the last week alone, the dev team fixed over 150 bugs and made sure the product truly showcases their hard work. On Saturday, we huddled around a computer and pulled the switch on put the code on a live URL. The system is now in limited release as we tweak it further based on user feedback and prepare it for a wider public release.

It is a great feeling to "ship" software. There is nothing like a the final few weeks of a ship cycle to bring a team close together. Countless late nights, having dinner in office, even sleeping over and working on weekends can get stressful and yet it is fun in a strange way when you see the result of your hard work coming to life. I definitely enjoyed it and I hope the team did too!

Comments

Congratulations on achieving this major milestone! Is the live URL public?

Posted by: Santosh | April 18, 2006 05:53 PM

Congratulations ! can't wait to see this in action !

Posted by: Ben Borges | April 19, 2006 07:45 AM

Congrats ! Oh yes, it IS really great to see result of hard work coming to life. That is very ofen the biggest reward for all the hard work done.

All the best !

Posted by: SK | April 19, 2006 09:23 PM

Thanks everybody! We are in alpha testing phase now and the system should go live sometime late June/early July.

Posted by: Gaurav | April 20, 2006 02:00 AM

Great Work GUYS.
Looking forward eagerly for public release.
Make sure you notifyme.

Posted by: Mir Nazim | April 20, 2006 05:18 PM

Is peopleaggregator open source?

Very cool stuff either way ... congrats!

Posted by: Jonathan Boutelle | May 3, 2006 08:00 AM

Jon, while licensing model is not finalized yet, People Aggregator will most likely be available as a free open source download for non-commercial purposes. Let me know if you want to check out the alpha.

Posted by: Gaurav | May 3, 2006 12:37 PM

Great news, can't wait to see the platform. If you need beta testers, please tell me. I'd be more than happy to do some testing.

Cheers, Raju

Posted by: Raju Bitter | May 5, 2006 04:04 PM

Raju, I will definitely invite you in for testing soon!

Posted by: Gaurav | May 7, 2006 12:30 AM

Congrats! I can use an invite too :)

Nag

Posted by: Nagendra | May 10, 2006 03:18 PM

While I'm excited about People Aggregator,

"free open source download for non-commercial purposes"

That's kinda contradictory. It violates rule #6 of the Open Source Definition (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php).