Sneak Peak: The New Cellarspot

We've been making lots of progress on the new Cellarspot, and we thought it'd be a great idea to show off a sneak peak. We've redesigned the next version of Cellarspot from the ground up.


Let us know what you think; give us some comments!

CVS vs. SVN

Don't use CVS. Just don't. Use SVN.

This post is so vague because I'm so frustrated with CVS that I don't even want to talk about it.

SVN > CVS. End of post.

Some Good Learning

Two members of the Cellarspot team, including myself, started working for Redfin this summer, which is an online real estate brokerage trying to change the real estate industry. Each of us has learned some really cool tricks to web development, and we're confident that we'll be able to apply what we learned to Cellarspot. What does this mean for our users? It means that we'll be able to release more features in a shorter amount of time, and our servers will be able to support more users.

We're both really excited to get back to work on Cellarspot! Stay tuned for some good updates.

Regarding Startups

After watching a keynote by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, I started to think about startups. Is it more often that startups are formed around a really awesome idea, or is it more often that startups are formed around a potential to make a lot of money? I don't know which of these two drove Mark to start Facebook, and I don't know the motivations of other entrepreneurs either. The keynote just got me thinking about how Cellarspot fits into all of this.

I remember the evening in March '06 when I thought up Cellarspot. I was walking to the grocery store with a fellow computer science colleague, thinking about the amount that each of us had learned over the course of a few months. By this time, my friend and I had finished most of our intermediate CS courses at the University of Washington, and we were feeling like we needed a project to apply our new skills to. I thought a project would be fun, but little did I know that it would turn out to be an experience like Cellarspot has been.

Cellarspot was founded by a small group of CS students trying to do something awesome, and my only hope is that that goal is reflected in the website. There is a lot of work that needs to be done, but I can assure that the next version will be much more awesome than the current.

Going Live

Going live has been an incredible experience. Some features that we thought would be awesome turned out badly, and some features that we thought would be bad turned out awesome. Starting a website, or any business for that matter, is all about understanding your users/customers.

Cellarspoters, we're one step closer to understanding you, and we promise that the next iteration of Cellarspot will be incredible. Our team has been working hard for the past few weeks, and we think that the results will be really cool.

Stay tuned!

MapReduce and Cellarspot

As you might know, Cellarspot was created and is maintained/extended by a group of third year University of Washington computer science students (including myself). As you probably didn't know, two of them are in a distributed computing course mostly focused on Hadoop (an open-source, Java-based MapReduce engine). The point of the quarter has come around where we're in need of a final project, and the two of us are trying to find a way to apply MapReduce to Cellarspot (or at least eventually) to provide a cool service to our users.

One idea we thought of was a specialized, wine-based search engine that would crawl stores, groups, clubs, blogs, and anything else we found relevant. Another idea was to create a powerful food and wine pairing recommendation system, but we don't have enough data yet to produce useful recommendations.

I think we'll be able to find a cool way to apply MapReduce to Cellarspot.

Post #1

Welcome!

If you're reading this, cellarspot.com is up and running. We encourage you to poke around and try out our exciting features, and then give us some feedback on what you like, and what you don't like, so that we can fix it as soon as possible!

Thanks!

-The cellarspot.com development team.