#convore

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A while back Eric Florenzano has published a post describing how Convore is using Redis Pub/Sub. There were a couple of things in that post that made me reach out to Eric for more details. Eric obliged:

Alex: Why did you go with Celery and Redis? Even Celery page recommends using RabitMQ.

Eric: Basically my philosophy is that all things being equal, less moving parts is preferable to more moving parts, especially with a small team and no dedicated ops person.  We were already using Redis for other things, like pub/sub, so using lists along with its blocking pop operation seemed natural as a simple queue.  Celery supports that kind of setup out of the box.  Additionally, the newest version of Celery works much better with Redis as it’s now a first-class citizen (instead of being supported by a module literally called ghettoq).

Alex: If I read you post correctly, for each group you’ll have a PUB/SUB in Redis. This means not only the number of subscribers could vary largely, but also the number of PUB/SUBs. How far have you tested the PUB/SUB in Redis? How do you plan to go with it?

Eric: Since I wrote that post, we’ve actually changed the pub/sub targets to be one for each person instead of one for each group.  This allows us to send messages like @mentions only to the user that’s interested, rather than to the whole group.  In any case, you’re right, the number of pub/sub targets will get large, and each one could have many subscribers.  I’ve tested it with a few thousand concurrent connections, and Redis has consumed a negligible amount of memory and CPU.

I’d love to be able to say that we’re ready to scale up to millions of concurrent connections, but that’s simply not the case quite yet.  As a company we’re focusing more right now on getting the product right and the business right, so that we have a reason to scale up to millions of connections.  It’s not a very interesting answer or approach, but I think it’s the right one.

Alex: Is Redis availability of concern for your application? How do you deal with it?

Eric: Our system is architected such that Redis being unavailable won’t block the write path into our RDBMS (our canonical source of data).  In practice this means that users may stop seeing real-time updates to their messages, but refreshing the page will show the messages properly as they arrived.   Alex: Sounds like a very pragmatic approach. Good luck with Convore and thanks a lot for your answers.

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via convore.com

I've been working on Banterly ever since I caught the startup bug at Startup School 2010. It started as a simple last minute idea to apply to Y Combinator, but has since evolved into something much more (despite not being accepted). If you haven't seen Banterly yet, go ahead and take a few minutes to check it out. Here's a link even: http://banterly.com

~ Intermission ~

Either you saw the announcement from Convore (http://convore.com) the week before last, or you don't follow startups. If you're in the latter group, you should probably just skip the rest of this and go start chatting on Banterly (or I suppose...Convore). If you're in the former, you may have taken one look at Banterly and thought "meh...this is just Convore with less features." But of course, we hope you thought "Sweet! This is what Convore should have been."

Regardless, if you're an entrepreneur like me, you can probably relate to my story. While it's normal to question any idea over the course of its development, it's also often a great source of agony and stress for would-be founders. Second guessing yourself is difficult, but even more difficult after getting rejected by Y Combinator.

However, after experiencing all of the ups and downs of startup-idea self-examination, there's one thing that's even more agonizing: being beaten to the punch. When I saw the announcement from Y Combinator about Convore less than two weeks ago, I was shattered.

In researching the space over the months we had discovered many competitors, so discovering someone else was nothing new. What made Convore different was that it was actually GOOD, it had buy-in from Paul Graham & Co., and seemed to get instant respect from people in the know--all things I felt needed to be in place to make something like Banterly successful.

Discovering that your 'revolutionary' product is suddenly a 'me too' product is a bitter pill to swallow. There's nothing like having your idea validated and taken away from you at the same time.

Somehow I resisted the urge to abandon Banterly (not easy as easy as it sounds) and have been working around the clock ever since to get something presentable ready anyway. Banterly, as we're releasing it today, is not perfect and has no shortage of bugs (which I am sure will pop up once people start using the service in greater numbers). I am the sole programmer working on it and have only limited time for it (not to mention learning Node.js + MongoDB--both new platforms for me).

So my question to the community is this: What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you cut your losses and move on to a new idea (we discovered several while working on Banterly)? Would you ignore Convore and go for it? Would you open source the code?