A couple of weeks ago, I’ve expressed concern about my development team’s handling of my project. At the time, I had begun to raise some doubts about whether or not they can get the job done. Today, I am glad to report that they have done well in restoring my confidence in their work.

To gear up for phase 2 development, I have started to go through the current completed modules in detail in order to give the developers precise feedback. Separated by a couple of oceans, this is not as easy a task as you would imagine. Sometimes items and issues that I wanted to change, un-change, and final decision can take several round trips before taking place. This is one disadvantage of not having an in-house team of developers that I can sit with and collaborate together with.

Between all of my “to do” list for the startup, growing and maintaining this blog, my day job, and family time, it really leaves me with no time for anything else. There are so much more to do and I constantly feel like I am always playing catch up. There are so much more of what I’ve learned and experienced for the last 6 months that I wanted to post, but there are simply just not enough hours in the day.

I promise that I will put together more detailed posts of my startup including the “shoestring budget” I kept talking about, the name, the detailed specifications that I am implementing and anything that I can share with those who are interested. But most of all, you know what? I am loving it!!

Well, I had a chat with the lead developer and project manager around 2am this yesterday morning. We went over some of my concerns and issues that need to be addressed. I can say that they are committed to take the necessary action to rectify whatever issues I have so far. They also agreed that some of the uploads were temporary and not the final product before the start of testing on their side.

I had a day off today and when I got up to check on the testing server uploads, I found some of the issues I had were rectified, and some of the look and feel were improved. Obviously there are still a ways to go, but seeing the improvement today made my day that much brighter.

So far, per our initial terms, I have only paid them half of the total amount. The next 25% is due when the site is ready for my beta testing. That was supposed to happen this week, and obviously the schedule won’t be met. However, from my past experience in IT projects, I have already added extra time cushion to the original estimate and therefore I am not too concerned about this delay. I won’t be releasing the 3rd 25% of the payment just yet. It will only be paid when it is ready for this phase one’s beta test.

I will make a more detail post about what I’ve learned dealing with offshore development firms for the past few months. There were some mistakes made on my part that, hopefully, won’t be made by my readers should they decide to outsource their development requirements one day.

When I started this blog, I promised that I will share with you my triumphs and defeats. This one may have to be categorized as a possible and near defeat.

I have started to lose confidence that my current team of developers can carry out the task I originally specified. They may not have been the right team for my startup project. Currently, I have not yet come to the point of making up my mind to make changes to the team, but I am starting to think of a different scenario of handing the project to someone else unless they can restore my confidence quickly in the next couple of days.

What had gone wrong? So far uploads have not been meeting my expectations. I have been monitoring several issues that may prove to me that they don’t have the technical expertise to implement. I really hope that they can pull through with the right fixes and solutions to regain my confidence. After all, I don’t want to make a change unless I really have to as time and money would be wasted.

I will be analyzing the issue more in depth and will post very soon about the mistakes made and what I am learning as it happens. This is not a happy report like most of my usual posts.

I just wanted to give a quick update regarding the hosting requirement issue from a couple of posts back.

I’ve decided after all that I want to have the ffmpeg support for preliminary testing. I mentioned that BlueHost, where this blog is hosted at, does not have ffmpeg support as it would be too CPU intensive for their shared hosting servers. I’ve signed up a month to month hosting plan account with APTHOST and will try them out just for testing purposes.

Remember, this process should’ve been accomplished on the developers’ development servers. But because their “Development Servers” for client testing are not equipped to handle what I’ve requested, we will use an outside hosting service for our testing.

I was hoping to use this long memorial weekend here in the U.S. to really test the uploaded modules thoroughly, but the upload won’t happen until Monday. The positive from that is that it’ll give me some time to make a few much belated posts about my startups’ early days.

I received an email from the lead developer asking for access to a test hosting server with a small list of hosting requirements. It appears that their development server, where I have been evaluating work done to date, is not equipped to run some of the required php library support. The hosting requirements requested are:

1.) Php 5
2.) Mysql 5
3.) ffmpeg support with php for video thumbnails
4.) Curl lib support
5.) Simple xml lib support with php
6.) Cron job

Bluehost, which this blog is hosted at, has all of the above items, except #3.) ffmpeg support with php for video thumbnails. I proceeded to install an add-on domain and only granted ftp rights with a separate password generated for the developers so they can ftp the application files under the add-on domain.

My site will not be hosting at Bluehost when it is ready however. It is a very fine host, but it is a hosting company that primarily serves the individual blogs, small businesses and the like. What they offer is not suitable for a social networking site and I will have to shop for a reliable and reasonably priced hosting company before Amazon’s EC2 opens up its spots again.

It’s been almost 2 months since Startup’s site development has started. Things look like they are coming together. Over the weekend, I registered as a user on the development server so that I can browse around like a regular user would. Some of the things I observed:

Site Flow: Pretty intuitive to anyone that has an inkling of social networking sites. As the features and functionalities are still minimal at this point, the design doesn’t seem clustered which is a good thing. There will be many chances for me to request design alterations before it is all said and done.

Functionalities: At this point, only 1/3 of the functionalities are working. Many links on the site are dead links. I am certain that by the end of this month, many of the rest of the links should be working well. I think the development process should be speeding up now that the planning process is long gone. This is one area that I feel is not going as smoothly as I’ve hoped. Over the next couple of days, I will bring this up with the lead developer/project manager so that we can get back on the same page. This is definitely a drawback to the outsourcing process as I cannot be there to supervise the development.

Amazon S3 Storage: I’ve gotten a confirmation email from Amazon to confirm that the connection to my S3 account has been established. I assume it means that S3 is ready to receive uploaded files to my account and will bill me accordingly. This seems like a simple enough process and I hope that when I am able to connect to Amazon’s EC2 service, it will also be a piece of cake.

World Map: Since this startup is a travel/location/friendship related social networking site, a world map will be included to identify city based locations of members, sponsors and users. So far the map functionality has not been completed. It is a central theme of the site and it is extremely important for it to be done right. We’ve decided to go with Yahoo’s map API because there are a couple of flash components that only Yahoo supports. Plus, everyone and his mama is using Google map and I wanted to differentiate

This upcoming weekend is an important one. It is our long memorial weekend and I am looking forward to the developers uploading some timely completed modules for me to evaluate a little deeper and to provide them with feedbacks.

Today I got an email from someone that has been following my blog. One of the questions he asked me was what technology stack I decided on. I didn’t realize that I haven’t touch upon that yet. Here I am going to talk about the technology stack used, Amazon S3 connection, and my search for a forum platform.

Technology Stack: The developers and I had decided on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL database, and PHP). We talked about Ruby on Rails but decided against it for now for several reasons.

1.) Fairly new framework that may have questions when it comes to scalability. Due to the type of social networking site it is going to be, PHP has the advantage since it is being used in many others.
2.) The development center has more PHP developers with vast experience vs. only a couple of RoR developers. In addition, there is a lot more support in the community when it comes to PHP.

Amazon S3 storage: For video, audio, and image storage, we have planned to use Amazon S3 due to its relative low storage and bandwidth cost. I’ve talked about it and Amazon EC2 before here. I had given the “Access Key ID” and the “Secret Access Key” for S3 to the developer a week ago to establish the necessary connection. I was told by him today that Amazon also needed my Web Services account login information. I went ahead and first changed the password to a temporary one since I didn’t want to give them one of the main passwords that I use sensitively.

Te keys are used to establish a connection and they identify the storage requests to my account in which I will be charged for the storage and bandwidth fees. I will have to further investigate down the road how and where do I go about altering the site’s codes should I generate a new password for my Amazon account. This will be served as precaution in not leaving access to my S3 and EC2 account for the developers when they are no longer working on my project.

Forum platform: The developers suggested the vBulletin forum platform and they are ready for the integration. I am not sure if that is what I want to use yet. I want to do some more research and see what other platform brings to the table before committing on one. If anybody out there has some good suggestions or recommendations, please post a comment and I would appreciate it.

The site still has a long way to go, but at least I can see that nice progress has been made. When people say a startup will take twice as long and 4 times original cost estimate, they sure ain’t lying.

As part of the weekend upload to the development server, the developers had uploaded a functional homepage. The site is starting to come together and I am excited. At this initial stage, many links are test links but the look and feel of the homepage is easily visualized.

It’s now been about 7 weeks into the site development and I thought that it is a good idea to hand out a “mid term” grade to the developers:

Time: B-
I feel that the development should be further along than where it is now. Progress has been slower than I had hoped for, but it seems from my experience that this is common. However, I still think it is too slow and the top level schedule is not a good gauge of progress made.

Quality: B
This part is subjective. I really won’t know fully until the site is launched and live to the world. I am actually a little concerned about this. This is the first social networking site that my development team has worked on, and I sometimes stop and think about the what ifs …. what if the code is not clean due to inexperience? What if there are way to many hidden bugs that won’t surface until the site went live? What if the design is not as good as it could’ve been? I chose this team based on my evaluation of its competency coding the main feature of my site. But what if the team is totally not the right team to code the rest of the project? What if I have a lot more startup capital … would I still hire this team?

Communication: A-
Communication with my developers in India has been pleasant. The project manager and the lead developer are available on Instant Messengers at most times. In order to serve its U.S. based clients, the project manager work his shift according to U.S. business hours. Since I usually stay up late at night working, I am always able to communicate with the lead developer during his office hours. I am quite pleased with our communication.

It has been approximately 6 weeks since I first gave the go ahead for my development team in India to start development of phase one of my startup. Slowly but surely, progress has been made even though it has been slower than I liked. Overall, the schedule has been followed.

I was up until 3:30am yesterday morning communicating with the developers. I’ve made some more comments on the home page design and requested some minor changes for one more time. At the end of this week, I should have the first peek of the front-end design with the functionality. From then on, it should get a lot more exciting.

My experience so far with offshoring my entire project has been mixed. I still believe I made the right decision to go the offshoring route because this project would’ve never been able to get off the ground had I not done so. The cost saving overcame many of the inconveniences and budget limitations of hiring in-house developers. For my circumstances, this is the only way. The jury is still out regarding future developments should I have more capital to burn.

Over the weekend, I got a sneak peak of one of the major features of the site that the developers had been working on. It was the back-end php code for that feature, but without the front-end design. I think by next weekend, I should be able to get a very good feel of the entire design and some of the functionalities.

In a couple more weeks, I will be gradually revealing what my startup and will ante up my blog update frequency. One of the reasons that I maintain this blog is to grow a small audience of beta testers when it is time, and I will be doing something different and exciting to promote this blog.

It has been a really long weekend for me (for the pass couple of weeks as a matter of fact) so I’ll keep this post short tonight.