At long last, it’s done. Snowdevil launched on 31.1.2005 after close to 4 months of the most intense but also fulfilling programming of my life.

I have learned a lot of things during all stages of getting snowdevil on the web and I would do a great many things differently if I were to start over again. I’m sure I’ll have lots of opportunities to share these new “insights” here on this blog but here are the highlights.

• Use Ruby on Rails if you do web development. If you don’t use it, start today. Newton said “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”. I consider the unveiling of Rails as one of the biggest jumps in productivity the computer industry has seen since it moved from assembler to high level languages. This is the time where small businesses can compete or outperform big businesses just because of better tools. You need to be as efficient as a team? No problem! By the end of the year most companies worth a damn will use Rails or a clone of it. Be ahead of the curve.
• Embrace Test driven development. Test cases are what make modern programming possible. Not only do they function as your personal QA department, they also save you a lot of time you would spend hunting for bugs; That means they subtract from the most tedious annoying and frustrating time part of software development, the bug hunt. If you are not writing tests yet I recommend this book.
• Embrace as many XP mantras as you can. Then apply them to everything you do, not only to programming. If I would have done this from the get go I would have saved us a lot of time. The biggest delay came from waiting too long to apply for the credit card processing. If i would have followed the “Most important feature first” practice I would have put the application in the day I started to code. Other then that, telling myself “Do the simplest thing possible” really helped me find the best code quicker than usual with less trying around. XP Is a major asset, If you want to learn more about it here is another book recommendation.

With that out of the way, I can’t even put into words how thrilled I am that the first milestone is done and the ground work is laid out and clearly seen by everyone who bothers to navigate to us. Its going to be a lot of fun to figure out all the aspects of running a virtual retail store and I’m thrilled that I’m doing it together with my business partner Scott Lake who is doing all the heavy lifting in the real world while pushing me to do an equally good job with the technical aspects of the venture. We have very ambitious plans for the snowdevil codebase and great technical challenges are yet to come. I can’t wait!

P.S: Since this is a technical blog and these numbers make me look good, here are the stats as per sloccount:

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 6,086
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 1.33 (15.99)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.60 (7.17)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 2.23
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 179,966
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).