Hey! I was blogged!

Today I did some work improving one of the Ning example apps, making it work faster, better, stronger. The app is Bookshelf, and it’s a ton of fun to watch. Basically, users add books (via the Amazon API), rate them, and comment on them.

Some aspects of the app were running way too slow, since it was designed and tested when the system was under no load at all, a situation which makes load testing very difficult. I won’t go into the technical details, but the long and short of it is that I took the book adding process and quartered the time it takes.

Apparently my changes were important, since Gina blogged about it. Although I’ll admit I had no idea who Marion Jones was until I Googled it, it sure made me feel special.

Gina also passed along the good news to me that helping out other projects in the free time I’ve got isn’t a problem from her end – so long as Ning projects come first. So, if you have interest in working to get an app running on Ning, but don’t have the spare time to learn all the ins and outs, feel free to drop me a line.

This is such a freedom after my last job, where doing any work outside the company was considered treason. It simply reassures me, yet again, that taking the job working for Ning is the best thing that has happened to me since I have left school — I’m working on fun projects, in a forward-looking environment, with great people, and a great management team above it all. While wedu is busy building the next version of We Don’t Get The Web, I’m helping to build the future, and I’m having the time of my life doing it.

Now to get some of my other apps up to snuff: a recent change in the core means that I can get access to pages without the use of cookies, which means it’s time to write that location updater client for my cell phone.

Updates as they come!

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