Chris Olsen

The LeagueSmart release was a very gradual one, just the way I like it. To be honest notifying thousands of people all at once about a new application is a little of the stressful side. Many tests can been written trying to ensure the app is as close to bug free as possible, but having an application with zero bugs is only possible in dreamland. That is what is nice about releasing something gradually. Bugs are bound to show up once different people start using the application in a much different way then you anticipated, and they did just that for me. Luckily they were fairly small issues and were able to be fixed quickly.

The release of LeagueSmart took about a week. I gradually notified groups (~400) of current SoftballSmart users on a daily basis, which allowed for any errors that were discovered to be fixed before most people saw them. I found doing it this way greatly reduced the tension build up when you are tailing the log files and the hits begin to come in.

If you are in charge of managing a league of any kind please check out LeagueSmart, and any feedback is always appreciated.

EdmontonOnRails is back with a vengeance! There was a previous attempt at getting Edmonton Rails developers together that didn’t make it too far, so hopefully things will be different this time around. The EdmontonOnRails site will be the place to keep up to date with news and upcoming events. If you, or others you know, live in Edmonton and want to join the group leave a comment below or email me (chris@chrisolsen.org) to let me know you are interested.

LeagueSmart is a web application that is designed to make creating league schedules and managing the stats as easy as pie. LeagueSmart is the upgrade of SoftballSmart, although the two will run in parallel for a while.

LeagueSmart is no longer created for just softball leagues, but will work for any recreational league. So far the application consists only of what is required for it to be useful, which is creating league schedules and keeping game scores. This may not sound like a lot, but anyone that has had to create a league schedule, will know that it can take a lot of effort to put together a schedule, and becomes a nightmare when a team backs out at last minute and the schedule has to be re-created. LeagueSmart automates the scheduling. To create the first schedule should not take a person any more than 10-15 minutes (depending on your team and game count), and recreating the schedule is even faster since you don’t have to re-add the teams, game locations etc.

Additional features will be added in the future, but right now I want to keep things as lean as possible to make sure that improving what currently exists is top on the priority list.

There are still a few more tests that I want to run before making it public, but I can say that things will be ready within a week.

I am happy to announce the launch of Onlinelistings. The purpose of the site is to allow realtors to create professional web pages that are easy to use for them and their clients.

This project was one that took a little longer than I initially estimated due to some factors outside my control and others that I never handled the way I should have. Below are a few tips to increase your chances of success, that I failed to remember while working on the project.

1. Get the least amount of work done first

   When working on even a small project the list of todos can begin to grow quickly and suddenly that small project becomes quite large. Features redefine the f-word ie. can really feature things up. What happens, is a good idea grows into something that seems to be required, which then results in the completion date being extended by a week or so. Add a couple more of these features and you have just added a month to the project. To prevent extended completion times determine what the core functionality is and work on nothing but that.

2. Establish a user base right away
   

   Without users even the best application is worthless. So get the core done, get it on the web then get people interested. Receive input from the users then make improvements to what has already been done. The benefits of this is that you get users that are interested, you get feedback from a different perspective than your own and you have a solid base to expand on.

3. Ignore the 20 percent

   There is always going to be the few, which includes you, that request the interesting features. Some of these suggestions may seem to make sense at first, but there is a good chance¹ that the people that are requesting these features are the same people that purchase items like the vibrating knife to later discover that they don’t need it as much as they thought they would. Don’t be afraid to say no to certain requests. If interest continues to grow over time then it might be time to re-examine things.

Hopefully this reminder will help someone else from making the same mistakes that I did.

If you know any realtors that have a site that is hard on a person’s eyes I would appreciate it if you sent them my way.

1. This statement is backed by absolutely zero data