New Venture, Part 10

This is part 10 of the series; part 9 is here.

The private beta of EDU 2.0 will be unlocked this friday, and the first set of users will receive their passwords shortly thereafter.

Now that the private beta is almost out, I thought I'd share a few statistics about the project:

• time to build the private beta = 1 year
• cost of all software = $1500
• cost of all hardware = $6000
• cost of legal work = $3000
• number of database tables = 28
• number of controllers = 48 (5 methods average)
• number of models = 42 (4 methods average)
• number of views = 48 (4 rhtml files average)
• number of javascript files = 15

In addition, we used the following third party software:

• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• Mongrel
• RadRails IDE
• MySQL
• FCKEditor
• Gruff
• ASCIIMathML
• Design Science
• RMagick
• ImageMagick
• SILK icons
• Yahoo Groups
• Typepad

Soon we will also be using:

• Subversion
• Capistrano
• Pound

We ended up implementing a lot more features than we had the time to test, so we removed a ton stuff that will be delivered in subsequent releases. The good news is that we have a very good idea of the roadmap for the next year because most of it has already been prototyped!

Part 11 of this series is here.

Comments

[Raman]

Graham,

Congratulations on getting this far! It was interesting to see the break down of cost between hardware and software, could you shed some light on the cost of hosting your web app ?

Good luck!

[Mike Cannon-Brookes]

What about the cost of your own time mate? That's far from cheap.

What are the plans for non IE users? Firefox is smaller, but all the early adopters are there. Crucial audience.

m

[Graham Glass]

Hi Mike,

The cost of my time is essentially opportunity cost; what else could I have been doing/earning instead? It's hard to put a number on that, because there are lots of variables involved.

So I prefer not to think about it ;-)

We're going to add support for Firefox and Safari in the public beta.

Cheers,
Graham

[Kytari]

Congratulations on the release this Friday! I am so thrilled for you.

[Bob Chen]

Great job!

How about how many people within the one year?
or man month?

[Nathan Lee]

So when you say "we", have you got anyone else working with you?

"Opportunity cost" - well I'm sure you're no stranger to the entrepreneurial slavery from your past ventures..

As a side note (and a fair way down the line), given you're in the education game: as the $100 laptop project progresses, might pay to ensure whatever you're doing will work on whatever browser they throw on those systems.
Assuming of course that network access is somehow available, but I suspect the ongoing availability of those machines will be something to think about longer term (as technology spreads, internet-ifying the developing world etc)..