RedSwoosh. free your links

So us techies are doing our part for Swoosh by throwing down a major code rewrite here in Thailand.

It’s a tough call to do a re-write. Customers always want new features yesterday, and that means Travis is on our butts to get things out. But what happens when features on top of features on top of features make for crazy-serious complexity? Eventually it takes longer to keep adding features on-demand than to re-write a next-gen platform. But then the rewrite means feature-freeze until we get the new client out.

The wager: Our existing client and server software does what it needs to do now, and does it well (can you name a better P2P content delivery system out there?). But the bet is that it will be a lot faster, easier, and cleaner to introduce the sophisticated and powerful new features needed over the next few years on the new architecture than on the current architecture. How about live-event streaming, ultra-high performance delivery speed that blows away our current 50% advantage over web-servers, and hitting high peer-efficiencies on super-rare content for starters.

The Bottom-line: Dive deep into coding and prepare an environment that will produce high quality code with even higher quality testing in a short period of time. Can’t get into the secret sauce here, but so far so good.

I’ve been part of Swoosh since February this year, but I only just physically joined the team yesterday, flying in to be part of this zany Thailand adventure. It’s been fun so far, and I know it’s going to get a whole heap more intense, and thus a whole heap more fun. And I know I just won’t be able to get that Six Million Dollar Man quote out of my head the whole time:

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. […] Better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster.”

Tom - code dude