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As part of a BzzAgent campaign, I recently tested Gusto.com.
Gusto.com is a social network around travel and helps you plan, daydream and share memories of your trips, with helpful resources, unbiased member reviews and online photo sharing. Like most social networks, Gusto.com relies on content that is generated by the community. After testing it for just a little while, I quicly realized that the community is still pretty thin and, hence, the content is very, very thin. For example, I tried to do some research on areas taht I’d like to visit such as Africa and the Philippines; there was not content from users, but there was basic content that can easily be found elsewhere. As the community grows, so will the content. But, for now, the content isn’t compelling enough for me.
Gusto Grabber
There is one feature that is very, very cool. The Gusto Grabber is a plugin that allows the user to highlight text, then hit the Gusto Grabber, and then the highlighted text is saved to your Gusto research space. This feature is very cool. You can learn more about the Gusto Grabber here.
Gusto on Ruby on Rails Goodness
I tried to do some research on Gusto and I found this really interesting email from the CTO of Gusto, explaining his joy and happiness for having discovered Ruby on Rails. That email can be found here:
Ruby on Rails came to my attention as the news surrounding it increased. I had been a big fan of Python and used it extensively when writing data mining code so I wasn’t a stranger to scripting languages although at the time I hadn’t written any ruby codeother then hello world a few years ago.
But after seeing the video, I was tempted to download the framework and test it out. It was clear pretty quickly that the framework had a lot of potential but I wasn’t sure how to go about things so I put in front of my team an option to take 2 weeks off from further Java development to attempt a port of our 25,000 lines of code to Rails and to see how far we got for one and to also assess the flexibility and productivity increase if any. Keep in mind that none of us had every coded any Ruby. We armed ourselves with copies of the PickAxe book, Agile Development with Rails and jumped in.
The first decision made was to adhere to the naming conventions instead of trying to force our singluar based model and do all the rails workarounds. That was one of the best decisions we made. By writing some scripts against the schema it took about 2 days to modify the schema via a bunch of SQL scripts to support the Rails naming conventions. Once that was done, we quickly ported a huge section of the website in the first 2 weeks. In all it took probably 4 weeks to port both the user site and the CMS back office application to Rails and it was all done with smiles on our faces. No more Eclipse, no more XDoclet delays when making simple changes to a database table. By the end of the port we had significantly improved the application while at the same time dropping roughly 15,000 lines of code from the system which lowered the complexity of our application significantly.
At the end of the day, the risk that we took has paid off in spades. My team is happy at work every day and we are pumping out more code and features then I ever could have imagined was possible with such a small team.
I think a lot of people worry about performance as did I. Until we launched I was nervous about how this was going to scale but now I feel like it’s going to scale very well and easily. As has been said, the LAMP issue has been solved and with the application of a memcached our site was hit with Siege with 50 simultaneous requests and was delivering the hugely database centric pages in under 1 second all from one server. But under a more realistic heavy load situation of 5 simultaneuous users we are seeing 200-300 ms response times.
Thanks again to this great community for making development fun again!
Michael Engelhart CTO – Gusto.com
Conclusion
Gusto can be as valuable and helpful as Expedia, TripAdvisor, or the other travel sites BUT after the community grows. Give it some time, and it will be a site to watch out for.
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