innonate

Happy weekend!

My family has had so much fun sharing Wordle scores together. We are a competitive group when it comes to games and trivia.

So, a few weekends ago I made a fun app where we could challenge each other with a different word each day.

The app is built on trusty ol’ Ruby on Rails, uses Twilio for authentication and notifications, and deployed on Heroku (still the GOAT for weekend projects).

You are welcome to join and even play our/my words (my profile is here wordgame.wtf/innonate) but really it’s most fun just to assemble your own crew (family/friends) and get to challenging each other!

Thanks for the feedback. Firstly, Amy is very awesome indeed.

And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to [email protected] :)

As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.

Fair enough. So perhaps not smart, but brave? When you have a lot invested in something like Google+ a smart call can be tough to make.

Would love to hang next time I come out to SF area.

Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them.

I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.

Very smart move by Google here. People don't trust Google+ as a repository for photos because it's inherently a social product and with social products there is always some confusion about privacy.

As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.

Nice post :) Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about the photo space, seeing how many of us cropped up at the same time, is that you can spend enough time on product rather than the hard tech stuff to make a dent in the world. We're 3 years in and just now starting to release the product stuff we're excited about because the tech challenges are so real.

Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.

Very cool!

It's clear they are putting everything into Photos and so this makes sense. Big question is what they do with all the edits/metadata/etc that people have invested in Aperture.

This latest round of updates for Apple certainly is interesting, but when's the last time they got photos right? For me it was the first iPhoto version, and since then every "exciting" development has been a bust. Main reason we're super positive at Picturelife.

As someone who publicly fretted that my lovely Twitter was over in 2010, I totally agree with MG here.

Knowing you, you already know :D

Hoping they add Objective-C to the list soon! I'd really like to learn that next.

Thanks! We never "launched" -- just one day we had a website and our beta friends started inviting other friends, and then we just grew from there. Looking back, though, that was a dumb idea. We shoulda done a mega big PR launch :)