1. You have not failed in life 2. The tone of the post seems like you have emotionally accepted that your current endeavor has failed and you are looking for external validation - but lets keep that aside for a moment -- Are you getting pull from customers about what you are building ? Is it growing at say >10% monthly rate? If not and your energy is running out .. Take a deep breath be pragmatic and think where do you want to leave an impact

It could be in the current area or another one and it is for you to decide. Hope this helps

Have been on similar boat and started my own ~7 mos back. Here are couple of points: 1. Be prepared for your savings to Last >1yr, unless you can get seed funding now 2. Is your gf/spouse ready for this 3. A start-up will not eat into your somewhat of social life, unless you want it to. IMHO I would say please hold on to it. You need that support. 4. PG talks about the weekend project thing .. didn't work for me coz they just loose steam 5. For the leaving NOW decision I would also consider if you have someone with somewhat of complementary skills ready to jump ship, If not I will spend the next 6 months finding that person and then quit [together]

Would be nice to know why RabbitMQ/ZeroMQ didn't fit the bill [scale/speed?] -- I can somewhat understand the not relying on SQS but then there is anyways a reliance on EC2 right ?

I thought the same thing about Rabbit. PinLater's ACK system feels like a questionable reinvention of AMQP. I'm probably missing something.

Rabbit's advertised throughput doesn't reach 100,000/sec, but you should be able to shard your way around that. Or use Apache Kafka, which has the sharding built in.

Just for comparison, LinkedIn is doing about 2.5 million messages per second (on average per day) with Apache Kafka.

http://www.slideshare.net/ToddPalino/enterprise-kafka-kafka-...

Precisely, this is the same query I had when I glanced down the post. It will be great if the author or someone from the team respond to the various trade-offs and why they did not go ahead with Kafka ?

(I am the author of the blog post). I posted a reply below earlier this morning that hopefully addresses your question.

Looks like they needed to have built-in support for time based scheduled execution of jobs at a specific time in the future. Rabbit MQ does not have that (that I'm aware of) without doing some horrible hacks around one queue per message.

ActiveMQ's had that for a couple of versions though. Another highly performant/available, atomic, consistent, durable and mature queueing server.

Correct. Celery's implementation dequeues but doesn't acknowledge the task, holding it until the timer is reached.

I'm curious here as well.

In plain english can one explain whats broken with iMap/current email and how Inbox fixes it ? I m missing something sure here

I wouldn't say "broken", but more "stuck in its ways" since it's a huge standard, used by everyone, and as a result, network effects (literally everyone online uses email) keep it from being improved in any way.

It's also hairy, slow, and a bit buggy.

Some concrete issues: https://gist.github.com/mscdex/5329227

Since everyone's using this standard, the only way forward is to either jettison the whole lot and start fresh (network effect means this will never happen), or to wrap it, maintain compatibility, and slowly get your wrapper accepted (which is at least possible in this universe).

IMAP is difficult to develop on.

1. IMAP's base spec (RFC 3501 [1]) offloads implementation on the client rather than the server. For example, the client must be able to parse the IMAP protocol, it must have be able to create threads by searching through emails, it needs to implement the logic for syncing, ... etc.

2. There are many IMAP extensions to patch the issues of the original spec [2], but implementation of these extensions across email providers is fragmented, and implementing them both server and client is plenty of work.

This is an attempt at a modern, cohesive API for email.

The point to discuss not really looking for a perfect answer :)

Excellent post on lifting the opt-in rate for push .. The opposite side of the spectrum is user annoyance and app abandons when these channels[specially push] are used to spam

Yeah, that's another post. This is just trying to get people to trust the app. Maintaining the trust is actually something else we've spent time on.

@bmull you might want to check out what we are doing in the space @http://www.informion.com - we are essentially using relevance as a key driver for engagement.

Would love to connect @ritwiktewari

Didn't work with my LinkedIn .. bug or too early for that?

Gives me At the moment, your network is not eligible for full access. You can try to integrate more networks to improve your score to 50 or check out our startup toolbox.

Thanks ritwikt for trying it out, Linkedin's API has proven to be a bit finicky compared to Facebook's API. At the moment, because we're also focused on mapping your social network and ironing out the details, we have quota score of 50 for testing out the full platform.

+1 to that Bizspark is an awesome program for startups. We are running linux on it w/o any issues [~3 servers come free] Best part - there are no restrictions on what s/w stack you run..

This if done right could really be a game changer - think getting an API where I could send a word and get back what it meant ...