Tagged “FivePad”

Concurrency on Heroku Cedar

I started a small product a few weeks ago called FivePad, a simple easy way to organize your apartment search. It's basically the big apartment search spreadsheet that you and me and everyone we know has made at least three times, except FivePad is way smarter.

The initial versions of FivePad did everything in the web request cycle, including sending email and pulling down web pages. The other day I was about to add my third in-cycle process when I threw up my arms in disgust. The time had come to integrate resque, a great little redis based job queueing system. Except if I ran it the way Heroku makes things easy my costs would get a little bit out of control for a project that isn't making much money yet.

Introducing FivePad

For over two years I've been ruminating on an idea for a webapp that would help people coordinate apartment searches amongst roommates. Finding a place is pretty tough, and finding the right place for you and one or more other people is even harder. Emails, phone calls, spreadsheets, links, bookmarks. It's a mess. So, I built FivePad. More details after the fold.

What sucks about apartment hunting?

I want to brainstorm everything that sucks about searching for an apartment. Why is it always so painful? Does it have to suck so much? I have some ideas but I haven't done this in almost a year so the pain, it is not so fresh.