Fun, Games, and Caffeine in Start-Up Land

Let me explain.

I like to take big bites.

I'm a ghostwriter. I'm a technologist. The two blend nicely. Summer is a slow time for me and I like to keep busy. 

I decided to use the next two months to get my big-assed Twitter System into a form that anyone can use. 

I wanted anyone to be able to build click-to-tweet links with images. I wanted anyone to be able to schedule Tweets in multiple ways. I wanted anyone to be able to apply hashtag rotation to those Tweets for easy cross-posting to other platforms. 

I wanted members to be able to support each other through retweeting.

Eventually, I wanted anyone to be able to combine big-data concepts with influencer-marketing concepts to build truly targeted lists of active followers.

I wanted all that to be easy and quick to do. 

I wanted it to be really cheap.

It started well. 

The rotation and scheduling scripts work beautifully. The building of click-to-tweet links work perfectly and even account for special characters in multiple languages.

I should note here that the system I envision is not a scheduling platform as much as it's a user-specific app. Users use our scripts as their own via our site. 

I guess it's natural for a ghostwriter to think in terms of ghost-coding.

We need to walk users through the process of getting and adding Twitter Developer credentials. It's an easy process that takes less than ten minutes to do.

That's when some weird stuff popped up. And, I mean "weird" in a Stanley Kubrick movie type of weird.

Some test users had no problem creating their account/app credentials. 

Others. . . not so easy (more like impossible, they would get hit with a blank page. . . no thrown errors, just a blank page).

Those who understand about coding, know. Intermittent problems just don't make sense. Either it works for everyone or for no one. Scripts are logical. Randomness is only seeming randomness. 

Scripts don't have moods.

Well, for us, the scripts only worked on about 50% of attempts. 

Huh??????

Here's the strange part. It worked every time for me! I ran it through 20 times using 20 different accounts. I never had a problem.

Huh?????

I originally chalked the problem up to user error. I wrote and re-wrote the instructions. I added a downloadable PDF so people wouldn't have to tab-jump (Gloria Ochoa's suggestion, thanks). 

I scanned my database, but only half the test users completed their accounts. 

My test users are not morons. They are all intelligent, well-spoken experts in their respective fields. They are several cuts above the average person who would need to do this.

The process is not complicated. Yet, only half succeeded.

Huh????

There was some serious head-scratching going on. Either they were having trouble or they were losing interest. 

Neither is a good thing.

Then it happened to me. An attempt to create a new account/app failed.

Huhh???

Whether procedural or object-oriented, scripts are basically just stored actions. 

How is it possible that two people do the same thing, the same way, but it works for one and not the other? 

The answer is, "It isn't." Randomness isn't real. It's just seeming.

I assumed I goofed somewhere in class definitions and/or setting/resetting variables. There's a lot of back and forth in getting a prototype working. I must have changed something along the way that shouldn't be changed.

I found and fixed 3 minor issues. The problem persisted.

Huhh??

I called a Council of War.

Last night my living room had four coders scanning some 20 pages of code. We were looking for what the f!ck was happening and why. 

We found nothing. 

Sometimes, it's easier to start over than to debug. 

This was one of those times.

We killed the account creation scripts. We re-wrote them. We made them leaner. We made them faster.

The coders left at 07:38 this morning. My wife was not impressed.

Then she saw the state of the living room.

She was really not impressed.

Then she saw the kitchen.

Oh, boy, am I in trouble!

I digress. Lack of sleep can do that.

I think the scripts work now. At least, they worked 20 times in a row. 

I still have a nagging doubt. Scripts just aren't an intermittent thing! 

The only intermittent thing is the hardware. Servers are electric. Electricity, by its nature, is intermittent. If the problem persists, I'll transfer the whole shebang to another server.

I'll test some more after I get a few hours of sleep. If you want to give it a shot, click here. I also want to modify the emailing script to include the instructions PDF as an attachment.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh, "Am I getting too old for this shit?"

Huh?

Naahh!

Ciao! I'm off to bed.

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