Random Remindlyo Things

I think everyone is due for an update on my remindlyo progress, but I don't really have an organized post. Here's a bunch of random thoughts instead.

WePay is awesome

Instead of the tried and true but well-known-to-be-horrible PayPal, I've decided to go with WePay for my payments integration. I made this decision last weekend and today I finally hit the "Submit for Approval" button on remindlyo's application page. The staging server made it trivial to write my integration layer, except that I found a bug when trying to test some things. What makes WePay so awesome is the fact that I was able to email some random person at WePay support and they put their team on the problem right away. Gives me great confidence on them having my back when actual production payment-related things go wrong.

GitHub and Heroku are great too

I've been using GitHub for a number of years now but this is the first project where I've extensively used a private repository. Seamless experience all around.

I also have no complains about Heroku. Being able to get this thing up and running and scaleable with basically no efford has be a lifesaver.

Rails? Eh. It's ok.

I've been building remindlyo in rails at the same time I've been working on another side project (Twitter Fiction Reader, go check it out) in sinatra, and while they're both ruby web development frameworks, they're worlds apart. Rails is heavy, opinionated, all-the-batteries-you-will-ever-need-included framework, while sinatra is svelte and agile and fun. The one saving grace of Rails is that there's an awful lot of people out there struggling with it too, so it's easy to find different ways of going about things.

Launching

I'm pretty sure I'm close to launching this sucker. There are only a few things things holding me back right now. WePay, but I'm assuming the people that approve applications don't work on Sunday so hopefully they'll get back to me tomorrow. The only other thing is the marketing site, which needs some love. I might just go buy a template from Theme Forest that includes the bits I need, because making attractive web pages is definitely not something I'm good at.

So, maybe next week? We'll see.