I said last week that February would be blogging month, but today came and I felt as though I had nothing to write. Still, I couldn’t start the month off on the wrong foot, so I’m beginning with a softball…
Every day we use at least a few tools to help run AppStoreHQ:
- Google Spreadsheet: We have a “master” spreadsheet that helps us manage all the ideas, features, and products we’re building, have built, or want to build. There are 3 tabs: Backlog, Roadmap, and Completed. Backlog is where we keep any and all ideas about what we want to do. Nothing is too big or too small to go here, all the way from bugs to “personalized recommendations.” Roadmap is where we keep track of the projects currently in progress or just about to begin. While the Backlog is tracked at a “feature” level, the Roadmap is at “task” level (where many tasks equal a feature). Each task has a time estimate (no less than one hour and no more than one day) and a “time left” estimate. This simple system works surprisingly well to keep us on track, informed, and cranking out the features, especially considering the various levels of project management I’ve used in the past (ranging from sticky notes to trac to FogBugz and on and on).
- GitHub for source code management. We host our code, a few docs, as well as do code reviews, etc.
- AWS: Our live site runs on AWS: EC2, EBS, S3, and SQS.
- Rails.
- Solr for all searching and browsing.
- Capistrano for all deployments.
- Google Analytics: At a price tag of free, this is an amazing tool for tracking your visitors. It’s quite simple to pick up the beginner features, but provides tremendous amounts of power user features as well.
- Vanity: A tremendous Rails based A/B testing framework, Vanity has helped us optimize various parts of the site.
Like I said, starting with a softball of a blog post. I’ve started to think of some better post ideas, but I’d really love some more, so please, ask me anything.
