

Cue: The 10 hour scramble to launch two days early - rwalker
http://tech.blog.cueup.com/cue-the-10-hour-scramble-to-launch-two-days-e

======
languagehacker
I think that this blog post is hiding the fact that a team of engineers had
their evening robbed from them, at no fault of their own, for something that
was ultimately kind of trivial. There are numerous reasons why it's a bad idea
to make engineers burn the midnight oil to rush the finishing of a product --
the first among them being Hofstader's law. If your team actually needed an
additional day of work, and you didn't already have your product in the bag,
you had no good reason to be courting the press in the first place. Mistakes
happen in the news cycle. This is usually why you do an unadvertised soft
launch shortly before a press release's publication date. This was a lack of
due diligence, and not on the part of the engineering staff.

I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping
of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that
are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to
implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and
putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or
"vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks
at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon.

The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people
responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the
last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to
market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars
to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was
fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical
debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their
guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would
have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of
days.

Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is
what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I
see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something
like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.

~~~
drusenko
It's negativity through and through here, and it's impossible to get away from
it. Consider the following:

\- You have a team that has been working incredibly hard pursuing a dream:
that they can build a product, from scratch, that is truly useful to millions
and millions of people. This is not an EA requiring engineers to pull insane
hours -- this is a labor of love and everyone has considerable equity.

\- It's a small team and that means each person has a lot of responsibility.
Don't like ever having to pull an all-nighter? Never want to work a minute
past 5? That's OK, but it means you have no real responsibility, and you will
be compensated accordingly. Others choose more responsibility, and they man up
when the shit occasionally hits the fan.

\- Have you ever coordinated a massive press push with the top print
publications? Then you have no business telling them how it should be done.
It's extremely difficult, it requires dates locked down months ahead of time,
and with that kind of advanced commitment, planning 100% accurately is beyond
difficult.

\- After this ordeal, the team posts an honest story from the trenches. Go to
any successful startup and you will hear many war stories like this. Nothing
is ever perfectly planned, unexpected shit happens. It's frankly awesome that
they shared it and gave some insight into what goes on behind the scenes that
you don't normally hear about.

\- What is your reaction? You shit all over them. Tell them that they're
horrible people and that they did it all wrong. Exclaim that you could have
done it all right and they have no idea what assholes they are.

I have no idea what drives this extreme negativity on HN, but it's gotten
completely out of hand.

~~~
pg
_I have no idea what drives this extreme negativity on HN, but it's gotten
completely out of hand._

Occam's razor says it's just the standard symptom of decline-- i.e. the same
thing that afflicts Youtube comments, just on a much smaller scale.

~~~
Dave5314
Most of the problem seems to stem from a couple of bad apples. I suggest
removing them before they spoil the bushel.

------
tlogan
I'm sorry for being a stupid consumer but I still don't understand what cue is
doing. I understood Greplin (search everything I have in the cloud), but I
don't get what is point of Cue.

Which problem does it solve? Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the
problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email
account.

~~~
mitchellhislop
Cue puts smarts behind all that data.

Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend.
This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing
anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the
event, with a link to the message.

When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes,
emails, events, etc) together in the same way.

Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes
this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was
smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but
doing it in a much smarter, faster way.

~~~
ebiester
How did you get it to do that? Does it depend on something being in the
calendar? Because it hasn't been able to pick up my trip in July yet.

~~~
pjscott
We're scraping flight confirmation emails from several airlines, but getting
all of the major ones working is challenging. If you've got a flight, it may
be with one of the airlines we don't support in production yet. The easiest
work-around is to put the trip in Google Calendar; they have a proper API. It
sucks that you have to do that much, though. We're working on it. If you have
the time, and you're willing to share details over email, we'd love to hear
from you at support@cueup.com.

Ultimately, we'd like to make a simple open API for various types of events.
How cool would it be if (for example) airline companies attached a machine-
readable version of your itinerary to the confirmation emails, the same way
they send out HTML and text versions? Then you could integrate that with any
tools you like. It would be like the "semantic web", except without all the
hand-waving and overly-verbose XML stuff. This would be easy to do -- the
budget would be peanuts to them -- but in order to get something like that
happening, we need to convince those companies that there's a demand for it,
that someone would actually use that machine-readable information if they
provide it. Our automated email scraping is an attempt to break the chicken-
and-egg dilemma, and hasten the spread of open machine-readable data for
things that are currently just auto-generated text, by providing a compelling
use for it.

------
lincolnq
Wow, this is gorgeous. Nice work.

I don't see the calendar entries from my iPhone's calendar - are they supposed
to appear? How can I get them?

~~~
asarazan
iCal support is coming soon. Stay tuned!

------
calinet6
Awesome looking product and a good story of down-to-the-wire work. Great job
guys.

Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys -
<http://www.cue.com/>

Probably wanted their domain name too :) Ah, well. Have you had any problems
there? I'm always curious about name clashes and how they're dealt with.

------
yabbadabbadoo
Awesome work.

Pls add a big, bold link to cueup.com from your blog to make it easier for
readers to check out your product.

------
ericfrenkiel
kudos to Daniel and Robby and the Cue team - having just finished our launch,
it's always stressful in the hours leading up. Rechecking lists, re-reading
docs, running through flows again and again.

The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing.

Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)

------
DanielRibeiro
I really liked Greplin (go to <https://www.greplin.com/> to understand how it
is related to Cue). I vouched for its ability to search twits (and other data
source) for such a long time, and now I'll probably have to search for another
product, as the team stops focusing on Greplin (and possibly eventually
killing it).

Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that
is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.

~~~
kevinclark
Engineer at Cue here.

The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search
functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't
an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is
going to stay that way.

~~~
pjscott
I'm another engineer at Cue, and I'd like to elaborate on this. We _need_
search, and we'll keep on needing it, because our service is not all-knowing.
No matter how cleverly we may predict what you're going to want to see next,
we can't possibly predict everything; there always needs to be a way for you
to search for things. We know this, and that's why, far from deprecating our
search functionality, we're always trying to improve it. The goal is to
minimize the time it takes to find whatever you're looking for.

~~~
samstave
To both of you engineers; when will you support exchange? All the data I want
to mine cues from is work data in exchange on my iPhone.

Is there a plan to support it?

Thanks!

~~~
kevinclark
This has been one of our most requested features. It is definitely something
that will happen, but I can't comment on timeframe.

When the iCal support ships, I expect you can use that to keep us sync'd even
before we have native exchange support. An exchange endpoint is how google
sync keeps my phone up to date with ical events, iirc.

------
chetan51
Cue has as of yet never worked for me. As in, it just says "Loading..." on the
Today screen, and never loads anything. Could it be an iOS 6 thing? I'd really
like to get it working; it looks so cool!

~~~
kevinclark
iOS 6 beta isn't supported yet. Soon.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148>

------
mthreat
I like the Lost reference - hugo@reyes.com

~~~
camilopayan
Linus, Pearl, Faraday

------
lucian303
If your launches are driven by PR you are in a hopeless situation.

~~~
onetwothreefour
You're all the way down the bottom here, but there's a lot of truth behind
your snark. :)

