Interview with Blanca Valbuena

A few months ago, my friend Blanca Valbuena pointed me to a Web site that she and her boyfriend, Antonio Davis Evans [3/7/2007: my mistake, sorry about that!], opened up devoted to food and restaurants. We had caught up with each other in late 2006; we had drifted apart since college (how we met is a rather funny story, particularly the part where I finally “met� her roommate, who it turned out I knew since 7^th grade), and it was interesting to find out what she had been up to since we last spoke in 2000 or 2001.

The site, friendsEAT, is a good example of a Web site that blends community features with commercial components in a way that is not obtrusive or invasive. The site is still undergoing some polishing, but Blanca was nice enough to spare me some of her time to answer some questions about the development end of the process in an email interview.

JJ: Did you and Antonio quit your jobs to work on the site fulltime, or are you still doing other things while the site gets revved up?

BV: The site started as a labor of love. On a drive to Cape May, I had been picking Antonio’s brain about starting a food magazine where friends would discuss their favorite restaurants & foods. As you know, I am in the wine industry and Antonio loves to cook.

I work as a wine importer and Antonio had been doing consulting and had run an Internet company before the bubble burst in 99. He started to focus on the site in the springtime. Suddenly we both noticed we were much happier doing something for ourselves…that said a lot.

To really answer your question: Antonio and his team are now working full time (80-90 hour weeks on the site) and I kept my regular job and work on the site every spare hour I have.

JJ: What technologies did you use to create the site?

Initially we looked at a bunch of CMS systems alongside with canned site skeletons but in our space there was nothing that could be taken “off the shelf”. We use an SQL backend along with PERL, PHP and AJAX. We wanted to have the underpinnings of Ruby on Rails, but at the cost to find a high lever programmer it would have bankrupted us.

JJ: What were the biggest technological hurdles that you needed to jump through, and how did you solve them?

BV: Finding quality developers, Antonio loved the Kevin Rose story [JJ: Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg], kind of the way we went about it. We started with Elance.com and getafreelancer.com. The reason we knew we needed to get an engineering team outside of the US was that we needed someone to man the site at all hours. Particularly since we are just getting out of our ALPHA, small mistakes and quirks can damage a site in its infancy. Our initial developer troubles happened when we were still in the sandbox. With the combination of reliability issues, Antonio was doing the majority of the coding. Which kept him in front of the computer all day. This did not allow us to grow the other end of the business.

Before we entered ALPHA, we were forced to look for a stronger development partner. We decided to go a different way about it and instead of hiring a readymade team, we put one together.

JJ: What surprises did you encounter while building the site?

BV: When we began developing, our requirements kept getting larger, but our time to market kept getting shorter. Unfortunately, bugs kill you. Every time we started developing new features and functionalities, something we thought was ready would surprise us with a bug of some sort. For example, We were using [iframe]S for some images on the restaurant search. I don’t quite love them…way too slow to load on a graphic intensive site. So we loaded the page and our users mentioned that the page kept strobing on them. We had to jump to our back-ups, and as you know, it’s hard to go forwards when you are stepping back.

JJ: What piece of technology helped you the most?

BV: We spent 70% of our development time on creating a robust backend. The majority of our development and tweaks were to get the underpinnings of the site static enough so we can use any front end we desire. We developed our back end with a lot of JavaScript, PHP and as a small god send - the SMARTY template framework engine. A lot of people would love to develop in pure PHP, but the luxury of having a simple template engine allows us to get pages ready in days instead of weeks.

JJ: Were you disappointed by any of the tools that you thought might help, but didn’t?

BV: Our host server. We were using an amazing server company, which we are migrating from. We started seeing a degradation of speed on our server, probably because our resources were being shared. We are going to a dedicated server. I am really interested in Amazon’s on demand hosting, it’s pretty interesting technology, being able to throw several CPUs during particular high traffic times.