Unlike any projects I worked in the past, including the in-house products of RH, this startup has been a totally different experience. For the first time, I didn’t have to bother about marketing, investment or any other non-technical (except perhaps recruitment) aspect. This allowed me to completely focus on the core architecture design and work with my awesome team to build it better than anything we’d done before. We decided to go one step ahead of our comfort level and experiment with newer technologies.

I’ve stuck with PHP for the code but much of the core is written in Python. Also, the frontend is based on an unusual AJAX (technically AJAJ)  interface – pure html/CSS with heavy JavaScript interacting with a REST API written in PHP. The core is mainly managed by Python and PHP acts like a mediator between the frontend & backend. For caching, a dual layer of Memcached & MemcacheDB is in place. However, just using a cache doesn’t mean your service will automatically scale. On the contrary, maintaining, optimising & avoiding race conditions with cache was one of the biggest challenges. Our third prototype contained an engine we call Cooper (named after one of my favourite TV Characters) resulted in success and now smoothly handles the cache & rest of the core without screaming for excess hardware.

I wish I could show a live demo of the product and [esp.] the code but both are property of Planga LLC and I will try my best to open source some parts of the code when the management agrees.

Much of this would not have been possible without my super-awesome team of code monkeys: Anomit, Ankur and Aditya. If you are studying at an University in US and you want our awesome product for your campus, feel free to personally ping me or email info [at] planga.com.

There has been some developments in the past week and I will divulge when the time is right.

Coming to my point, our company has decided to move on to other projects & I, have decided to take over Filttr’s development & server expenses. We have never charged our users and I do not plan to do so either and yes, ads suck! There are no major bugs (tracker.filttr.com) but I will try to add more features (filttr.uservoice.com) during my free time. I’m already in the process of developing FilttrFon – a mobile app for iPhone & Android.

I would be grateful if people can even donate something as little as $5; it will help me pay for some part of the expenses and most importantly, encourage me to continue developing Filttr!

–
Swaroop

P.S. You didn’t think I would actually forget mentioning Star Wars day, would ya? Hint: Check title.

I couldn’t hop around like an excited kid on finding every coll feature of the phone since I already owned an iPod Touch and have been working on iPhone apps. I was forced to “unlock” the potential which did help bringing out much of the hidden potential. Some day, when I am competent in Objective-c, I might try a hand at a few hacks myself.

Once the screen replacement arrives, I’ll be posting pics. I don’t need to review this gadget, do I?

Instead of regretting what happened 4 years ago, I decided to treat this day like a birthday (maybe, better). I wore new clothes, had a filling breakfast, headed to work with a strong mindset, called many of my friends and re-structured (delete all posts, change theme) the blog to bring it back up.

Ever since I moved to Twitter, I’ve always had a need to say something more than 140 chars. Less workload should now allow me to do that. I’ve decided to keep the bits & bytes to Posterousспални – which I will soon be integrating here. And oh, this theme is temporary. More later..