Popfly Beta is Here

I’ve worked for almost a year on Popfly, and today we announced our beta release. Invitations are no longer required – go to http://popfly.com/ and have a look!

Popfly excited me from the first time Paramesh Vaidyanathan showed it to me, because I could see how it makes the power of programming accessible to so many more people. My first task on Popfly was to make it work on a Mac. I’m happy to say that today it does work on Mac (except for a few cosmetic issues) mostly because of subsequent hard work of other software engineers on our team. I proved to myself that it works by publishing my blueberry pie recipe using Popfly’s nice web page editor which came from Office Live. Check out my recipe at: http://www.popfly.ms/users/RealHeartMozart/Blueberry%20Pie.

Popfly Web Editor on Mac OS 10 with Firefox 2

Now I’m responsible for testing of Popfly’s features, performance, and security. The main challenge is how to verify that we got everything right while also remaining agile and pushing out significant improvements every month. It constantly forces me out of my comfort zone because we want to take risks – exactly the right risks! I’m learning a much higher degree of trust in my teammates. Often when I’ve missed a meeting I hear later that someone expressed exactly the “test” point of view that I would have expressed.

Here are some highlights of my experience on Popfly:

• It used to be there was a manual for the language you were programming in. That book became a dog-eared “bible” – like a friend because you knew it so well. Common Lisp by Guy Steele was such a book for me. I loved that book. Now the bible is the whole world. The essence of mashups that you can create with Popfly is pulling together a variety of web sites and other sources to create something of value to you.


• The immediate Popfly team comes from four continents and there isn’t a given first language that a majority of the team speaks. Our team is a “mashup”!


• As the oldest member of our team at 47, I find myself asking a lot of questions, like “what exactly IS Web 2.0?” “What is the object of the game in Halo?” Etc. etc. Somebody at my recent 25th college reunion recalled the old saying that “youth is wasted on the young.” I don’t know about that, but it sure is a blessing to grow and learn with this group of people.

I also have a lot of questions, like what will our customers want to do with Popfly? It’s thrilling to read the Popfly forums and see our customers trying to do all kinds of things. It’s a blessing to be able to work with them and our team to define where Popfly will go.