Four months ago, we finally reached the finishing point at alpha. It was a long run. Yesterday, we reached closed beta and though it took less time then alpha, the complications and amount of work needed to get things up and running made the journey seem so long it made alpha look like a mere warm-up.

We switched directions after alpha and decided to completely focus our energy on the API and platform aspect of Widgeous. Initially, on top of our the platform, we planned to create an application that allows people to build applications that ride on the Widgeous platform using a drag and drop interface. Our goal was to make it so simple to use that even non-geeks can use it to create useful things. The goal was a huge one and eventually became huge enough that we decided we will not have enough resources to sustain a development term long enough for us to build something useful without compromises.

So here we are at closed beta, after a long road from alpha. Over the past four months, we introduced improvements to our development workflow. On top of our revision control system with Subversion, we added Trac as the bug/issue management system of choice. The need arose as we progressed further into development, more bugs and issues were discovered and it became increasingly difficult to manage them in ProjectPier, what we are using for collaboration. We are not saying ProjectPier is a bad software. We are still using it but for managing bugs, we needed something specialized. As we mostly work from home and only occasionally from the Widgeous office, we needed to communicate efficiently. We started using Yugma, a web-conferencing software that allows use to share screens and go over code and UI collectively, as if we are in an office. For voice discussions we use Skype.

The development phase towards closed beta went on overdrive as we approached May 21^st, which was yesterday, the planned launch date and also the day we had our first public presentation at BarCampSingaporeII. BarCampSingaporeII was organized by Barcamp Singapore, Singapore PHP User Group and Entrepreneur27 (Garag3) and was the first local community event sponsored by Google Singapore. Thus there was a silent tendency among us to want to impress. This motivated us greatly and though tickets are appearing in Trac at a rate faster than we were able to resolve them, we pulled through, albeit mistakes and incomplete parts. Think 37signals philosophy, it is better to build half a product than a half-ass product.

We started work in our office early in the morning. Everyone arrived at the office less late (haha!) than usual and started hacking and fixing. U-Zyn and Kah Wee was busy with clearing development-related tickets in Trac and Ridzuan was busy with his well-thought out presentation, while I was finding bugs and fixing UI issues. There was a real sense of teamwork within the team and everyone was high on spirits, though some of us had been working late nights prior to this day. I am really happy to be in this team.

Few hours before the 7PM event, we ran into some issues with the live server which required kernel-level updates and we had to switch between name servers for our development and live domain. We were almost disappointed that we couldn’t open up for registration because our DNS records for widgeo.us did not propagate in time due to the last-minute switch. We were supposed to set off to the event at 6PM but left many minutes after, when the site at widgeo.us finally went up.

On the way to the event in U-Zyn’s car, Kah Wee was still trying to get the “Floating Room” app (for our event presentation) to work, apparently affected by last minute changes to the code due to the server problem earlier. When we finally reached Park Mall, the event location, we had to climb several flights of stairs on foot as the lifts were packed full of sardines from the evening rush hour. Though our presentation was scheduled to be around 9PM, we had to be there early for registration. We found a fairly vacant room at the venue with a good connection to the net and plenty of power points and continued our work there. Chandrashekar Raghavan, BarCamp’s co-founder was with us in the room for some light-hearted chat. We were then joined by Sek Ling, U-Zyn’s girlfriend who took some good pictures of the event.

We managed to fix things and soon enough it was our turn to present in breakout session 2. Ridzuan gave an impressive and hurmorous presentation on the current state of communication and how Widgeous can simplify things, followed by U-Zyn’s presentation and demonstration of the capabilities of the Widgeous platform and API, with “Floating Room” as the example. I am glad everything turned out good. People quickly participated by logging on to the Floating Room as chatters and some even registered on the spot.

There were 2 breakout sessions. Chandra wanted the audiences of breakout session 1 to experience Widgeous so he got us to do another presentation, this time to an even bigger crowd. I was stoked to see that we are somehow the star of the show.

It was a great event and opportunity to showcase what we have done over the past months to people who matter. Thank you all, organizers, sponsors and attendees who contributed to the event and made it enjoyable and productive.

SgEntrepreneurs has a good overall coverage of the event and Ian too.

Many thanks to the following who featured us
Singapore Entrepreneurs

Yesterday evening at Barcamp, while Google was giving their keynote presentations, the Widgeous team was all huddled up in some back room(ok, so it was the other presentation room) hacking away trying to make sure that they would be able to present…and at around 8.30pm or so…

We Launched!

This marks an exciting time because the many months of work have finally shown some kind of tangible product. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the many people who have been giving us moral/technical/any-other-kind of support!

I also want to give a huge shoutout to the team for all the work that they’ve put in especially in the days leading up to the launch(to very last second before we presented).

To Kahwee and Uzyn for coding non-stop throughout the entire last push before launch - without them, the demo might not even have been possible. A huge pat on the back for Aen for his excellent design work - if there’s one person that puts more thought about design and usability than the rest of the team combined, this is the man.

From here, there’s so much to do. So many bugs to fix. So many enhancements to implement. So many changes to make.

I’d like to thank those who listened to our demo during barcamp and also to those who gave us valuable insight and feedback on how we can move forward. We’re definitely looking forward to hearing from you.

If you haven’t gotten your account yet, you can probably still get one over at our main site. The invite code is “barcamp”. (Note: There are limited invites and they were meant for the barcampers so it might run out pretty soon)

But if it’s out of invites, you can still try out FloatingRoom, which is an app we created as a demo. It floats on Widgeous of course.

Thank you for supporting us…and for now, well, bearing with the bugs while we continually evolve Widgeous.

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Random Tip:
Widgeous members can send a direct message to other members by typing in
dm ridz84 Hello there! How are you?

This will send a message directly to “ridz84″ and to his preferred channel that he set.