The main advisor on my startup pointed me to the Cron article yesterday, advising me that this is how not to run a startup. However, I think valleywag’s take on the article makes a stronger point. Selling a company’s weakness as a strength is the wrong approach to marketing one’s company. You don’t want to get mentioned in this type of article.

btw, Doctor Who rules.

It would appear that 8apps is having issues registering it’s potential userbase. Now typically I’m very forgiving about this type of thing, in part because I’m actively working on a project that will face similiar issues. Everyone makes mistakes. However in my attempt to become a user of 8apps, I’m a bit frustrated with their customer service experience so far. Let me explain.

Catching the news of their launch on wednesday via mashable, I surfed over to 8apps to sign up. Their beta launch is private, so you sign up with the hopes of getting an invite. All standard stuff, so no issues there. And today I received an email accepting me into the beta. Sweet!

So I followed the link they sent me via email for completing the registration process. When I did, I reached an error for an invalid registration code. No worries though. This kind of thing occurs and is likely an easy bug to fix (I’ve had to fix one recently myself).

Well the issues comes in to how they planned for a failure. The first thing I did was go back to the email I received. I wanted to fire off a response via the invite email but couldn’t due to their use of a no-reply address. Fair enough but the rest of the content of the email also didn’t include any followup information in case of an issue. This becomes real problem when someone needs to contact them. Ok, so complaint one.

So I surfed back to their front page to see about some contact information. When I looked all over the site, I couldn’t find an address to send mail to for any type of support. No contact page, no support issue page, nothing. Just references to 8apps blog and to jon kenpon’s site for more information on the release. I’m assuming that they are under the impression that folks who have signed up for their service will only have issues when they’ve logged in. But no, there is not an easy way to contact them before that. That’s complaint two.

If you look at this blog post here, there are already two comments about failures in registration. It appears that the comment system is the only approach to give feedback to 8apps currently. And no one has picked up the hint that there is a problem. If I was them, I’d be watching the comments come in. This being their source of feedback, they should be aware quickly of what’s going on and be able to address issues. Hell, just acknowledge them and let folks know you’ll get back to them when the bug’s fixed. So complaint three.

With those three complaints, I’d say they’ve failed me as a potential user. In the project I’m working, we’ve put some time into how we plan for, react to and respond to issues we will encounter.  Little things that determine our customer’s experience when they find them. We can’t solve for every problem and plan for every situation. We can just cover all our bases and hope for the best.

Now this isn’t to say I don’t want to use their app. Nor that I won’t do so when the issue is resolved. But to me right now this is a serious failure of customer service.

Until they discover the truth and mock you mercilessly.

So what am I talking about? Database access in Django, which apparently is an implementation of object relational mapping. What this allows you to do in python is write a class representing a table in your database. Then you can access that table as an instance of that class in your python code. No sql. No mucking with your connection to the database. Now isn’t that sexy?

Well, it’s saving me a hell of a lot of time when prototyping the startup I’m working on. So yesterday I decided that I wanted to use django’s db api in a backend server I’m writing. Since this app would be working inside the same tables as the front end web app I’m building in django, I figured it shouldn’t be too difficult. Did some digging via google and mailing lists but didn’t find the answer I was looking for. So after a bit of hitting the head against the wall, over analyzing of a simple traceback and discussion with some django folks, we came to a very simple solution:

import os, sys
sys.path.append("path/to/project")
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = "project.settings"
from project.app import models


You just add your path to your settings.py (for db access variables) and set a variable to the project settings file in the app’s running environment and your done.   Create classes for all of your db tables and you’re good to go with any python app using django for db access. Again, sexy.

For more details hit the docs on the api on django’s site.

But the title is more than just a reference. It’s an accurate depiction of what this blog. Another effort for me to try this blogging thing. Previous attempts have just blown. But my momma didn’t raise a quitter, so…