Official Cosmotourist Blog

I’ve just met with one of the guys of the startup LAMP1701 here at the web 2.0 expo in berlin and they really have some exciting stuff going on, at least if you are interested in operating small to large web applications. Although I have agreed on not disclosing everything I have been shown, I think a few things should be OK … or?

Their main goal seems to be to increase end-to-end transparency and visibility of your web app(s) both on the operating level, ie. where are things going wrong in the software, but also on the business level.

I#ve been shown some large companies, you know them all, and their feedback on their first product mod_top is just impressive.

Now that I have also played around with mod_top a bit I can say that after only running it for about 5min we have already identified and fixed two performance bottle-necks on Cosmotourist!

Keep up the good work and let us know as soon as you have some more tools to play with!

Web 2.0 Expo, presented by O’Reilly, is really keeping me busy these days. Having come to Berlin on Sunday night, the first day was spent having some workshops. Most interesting ones where definitely Cal Henderson’s (Flickr) Scalable Web Architectures and Kathey Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users talk. The presentation and entertainment by Kathy was better though

Today we had several quite interesting sessions. First of all Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon) announcing the availability of Amazon S3 Europe which should have quite a big impact on distributed storage for small to medium companies in Europe. Until now S3 with Amazon’s datacenters in the US was quite useless, due to latency, for us here.

Another interesting session was Google’s Patrick Chanezon presenting OpenSocial to a huge audience here in Berlin. Without having counted everyone, my feeling would be that this talk was one of the best visited ones. Unfortunately the talk didn’t really give any more insight into OpenSocial than what is already publicly known and can be seen in the Google code documentation.

If I find some time tomorrow I’ll try to write up some of the notes I have taken. There are just loads added to my notebook every day

During the early stage of our project we decided to outsource to companies outside of Europe. We just did not have enough money to finance German developers – we thought.

We were shocked when we did a benchmark mid this year against a German outsourcing company. Even though the cost per labour was much higher, the productivity, and the quality was so much better, that the overall development cost were equal.

Fred intensivley looked after our service provider and monitored also the quality of code and discussed the issues in detail. But our complaints were not taken seriously.

After the quality of our outsourcing company decreased even further and the code they delivered and which we reviewed was really messy (not scalable, difficult to maintain etc.), we decided to stop outsourcing outside the western hemisphere and to work entirely with the German Company. We looked on all topics, which did not work and proposed to the old company a decrease the still outstanding payment. We only transferred parts of the outstanding sum. We already had agreed on decreases for not delivered parts or quality issues several times before, but always without the consequence that the co-operation would stop.

Now, including the cease of our Partnership: Endless discussions with our old service provider and unfortunately without the will to compromise at all. We even were threatened: “…If by the end of this week I am not getting any feedback and finalization on payments then we are launching another methods for getting back the money and harming your business.”

We still fight for an agreement and hope that we will seperate in good faith without getting our business harmed.

Our advice for start-ups: Never outsource to companies outside your own country.
News on this will follow…