

Show HN: My New App for Building a Roadmap - k1w1
http://www.aha.io/

======
k1w1
I am the lead developer on Aha!. We built it to help product managers and
developers collaborate on features and roadmaps. We have been working around
the clock (well, almost) for the last few months and today we finally allowed
open signups. We ran a private beta ([http://blog.aha.io/index.php/great-beta-
programs-a-contraria...](http://blog.aha.io/index.php/great-beta-programs-a-
contrarian-view)) and got lots of great feedback from a group of really
engaged users. This was a big change from my previous startup where we ran an
open beta and had thousands of users, but little useful feedback.

I have been writing Ruby on Rails applications for a long time now, but it was
a real pleasure to start from scratch using the latest version, and all the
wonderful gems that are now available.

We wanted the UI to feel really responsive, and to allow almost real-time
collaboration by multiple people. The underlying technology is Rails, with as
little Javascript/CoffeeScript as possible, but with extensive use of Faye
([http://faye.jcoglan.com/](http://faye.jcoglan.com/)) to enable real-time
notifications between users, and also to update the screen of the current user
in response to their own changes. This allowed us to focus more energy on the
Rails backend, and put all the business logic in one place without giving up
the real-time user experience that a Javascript framework provides.

Between Faye and Rails' Turbolinks, I've been really pleased with how easy it
is now to get great performance out of a Rails app.

------
bdehaaff
Kudos to Chris and the technical team for delivering Aha! The feedback from
the beta was tremendous. We are thinking about how to open source some of the
original components that the team built for analytics, notifications, and
real-time page updates.

