7 ms·

Cue: The 10 hour scramble to launch two days early

79 points by rwalker 14y ago

mthreat 14y ago
I like the Lost reference - hugo@reyes.com
- camilopayan 14y ago
  Linus, Pearl, Faraday
chetan51 14y ago
Cue has as of yet never worked for me. As in, it just says "Loading..." on the Today screen, and never loads anything. Could it be an iOS 6 thing? I'd really like to get it working; it looks so cool!
- kevinclark 14y ago
  iOS 6 beta isn't supported yet. Soon. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148
DanielRibeiro 14y ago
I really liked Greplin (go to https://www.greplin.com/ https://www.greplin.com/ to understand how it is related to Cue). I vouched for its ability to search twits (and other data source) for such a long time, and now I'll probably have to search for another product, as the team stops focusing on Greplin (and possibly eventually killing it). Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.
- anateus 14y ago
  The cue app has search as a core, though secondary functionality. It doesn't seem to me that they will phase it out, though they may indeed change the way the app expects you to interact with its search interface which perhaps may run counter to your use case.
- kevinclark 14y ago
  Engineer at Cue here. The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is going to stay that way.
  - pjscott 14y ago
    I'm another engineer at Cue, and I'd like to elaborate on this. We need search, and we'll keep on needing it, because our service is not all-knowing. No matter how cleverly we may predict what you're going to want to see next, we can't possibly predict everything; there always needs to be a way for you to search for things. We know this, and that's why, far from deprecating our search functionality, we're always trying to improve it. The goal is to minimize the time it takes to find whatever you're looking for.
    - samstave 14y ago
      To both of you engineers; when will you support exchange? All the data I want to mine cues from is work data in exchange on my iPhone. Is there a plan to support it? Thanks!
      - kevinclark 14y ago
        This has been one of our most requested features. It is definitely something that will happen, but I can't comment on timeframe. When the iCal support ships, I expect you can use that to keep us sync'd even before we have native exchange support. An exchange endpoint is how google sync keeps my phone up to date with ical events, iirc.
    - DanielRibeiro 14y ago
      Thanks for the quick and reassuring feedback. Good luck with this new approach.
  - samstave 14y ago
    Are you the same Kevin Clark from Lucas Film?
ericfrenkiel 14y ago
kudos to Daniel and Robby and the Cue team - having just finished our launch, it's always stressful in the hours leading up. Rechecking lists, re-reading docs, running through flows again and again. The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing. Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)
lincolnq 14y ago
Wow, this is gorgeous. Nice work. I don't see the calendar entries from my iPhone's calendar - are they supposed to appear? How can I get them?
- asarazan 14y ago
  iCal support is coming soon. Stay tuned!
calinet6 14y ago
Awesome looking product and a good story of down-to-the-wire work. Great job guys. Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys - http://www.cue.com/ http://www.cue.com/ Probably wanted their domain name too :) Ah, well. Have you had any problems there? I'm always curious about name clashes and how they're dealt with.
tlogan 14y ago
I'm sorry for being a stupid consumer but I still don't understand what cue is doing. I understood Greplin (search everything I have in the cloud), but I don't get what is point of Cue. Which problem does it solve? Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email account.
- mitchellhislop 14y ago
  Cue puts smarts behind all that data. Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message. When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way. Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.
  - ebiester 14y ago
    How did you get it to do that? Does it depend on something being in the calendar? Because it hasn't been able to pick up my trip in July yet.
    - asarazan 14y ago
      Shoot an email to support@cueup.com and we'll look into it.
    - pjscott 14y ago
      We're scraping flight confirmation emails from several airlines, but getting all of the major ones working is challenging. If you've got a flight, it may be with one of the airlines we don't support in production yet. The easiest work-around is to put the trip in Google Calendar; they have a proper API. It sucks that you have to do that much, though. We're working on it. If you have the time, and you're willing to share details over email, we'd love to hear from you at support@cueup.com. Ultimately, we'd like to make a simple open API for various types of events. How cool would it be if (for example) airline companies attached a machine-readable version of your itinerary to the confirmation emails, the same way they send out HTML and text versions? Then you could integrate that with any tools you like. It would be like the "semantic web", except without all the hand-waving and overly-verbose XML stuff. This would be easy to do -- the budget would be peanuts to them -- but in order to get something like that happening, we need to convince those companies that there's a demand for it, that someone would actually use that machine-readable information if they provide it. Our automated email scraping is an attempt to break the chicken-and-egg dilemma, and hasten the spread of open machine-readable data for things that are currently just auto-generated text, by providing a compelling use for it.
languagehacker 14y ago
I think that this blog post is hiding the fact that a team of engineers had their evening robbed from them, at no fault of their own, for something that was ultimately kind of trivial. There are numerous reasons why it's a bad idea to make engineers burn the midnight oil to rush the finishing of a product -- the first among them being Hofstader's law. If your team actually needed an additional day of work, and you didn't already have your product in the bag, you had no good reason to be courting the press in the first place. Mistakes happen in the news cycle. This is usually why you do an unadvertised soft launch shortly before a press release's publication date. This was a lack of due diligence, and not on the part of the engineering staff. I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon. The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days. Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.
- kevinclark 14y ago
  Engineer at Cue here. This was a team decision. There was no mandate from on high - we're not abused. It was time to ship, so we made it happen.
  - 14y ago
yabbadabbadoo 14y ago
Awesome work. Pls add a big, bold link to cueup.com from your blog to make it easier for readers to check out your product.
lucian303 14y ago
If your launches are driven by PR you are in a hopeless situation.
- onetwothreefour 14y ago
  You're all the way down the bottom here, but there's a lot of truth behind your snark. :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

79 points by rwalker 14y ago

mthreat 14y ago

I like the Lost reference - hugo@reyes.com

camilopayan 14y ago
Linus, Pearl, Faraday

chetan51 14y ago

Cue has as of yet never worked for me. As in, it just says "Loading..." on the Today screen, and never loads anything. Could it be an iOS 6 thing? I'd really like to get it working; it looks so cool!

kevinclark 14y ago
iOS 6 beta isn't supported yet. Soon. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133148

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

I really liked Greplin (go to https://www.greplin.com/ https://www.greplin.com/ to understand how it is related to Cue). I vouched for its ability to search twits (and other data source) for such a long time, and now I'll probably have to search for another product, as the team stops focusing on Greplin (and possibly eventually killing it). Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.

anateus 14y ago
The cue app has search as a core, though secondary functionality. It doesn't seem to me that they will phase it out, though they may indeed change the way the app expects you to interact with its search interface which perhaps may run counter to your use case.
kevinclark 14y ago
Engineer at Cue here. The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is going to stay that way.
- pjscott 14y ago
  I'm another engineer at Cue, and I'd like to elaborate on this. We need search, and we'll keep on needing it, because our service is not all-knowing. No matter how cleverly we may predict what you're going to want to see next, we can't possibly predict everything; there always needs to be a way for you to search for things. We know this, and that's why, far from deprecating our search functionality, we're always trying to improve it. The goal is to minimize the time it takes to find whatever you're looking for.
  - samstave 14y ago
    To both of you engineers; when will you support exchange? All the data I want to mine cues from is work data in exchange on my iPhone. Is there a plan to support it? Thanks!
    - kevinclark 14y ago
      This has been one of our most requested features. It is definitely something that will happen, but I can't comment on timeframe. When the iCal support ships, I expect you can use that to keep us sync'd even before we have native exchange support. An exchange endpoint is how google sync keeps my phone up to date with ical events, iirc.
  - DanielRibeiro 14y ago
    Thanks for the quick and reassuring feedback. Good luck with this new approach.
- samstave 14y ago
  Are you the same Kevin Clark from Lucas Film?

ericfrenkiel 14y ago

kudos to Daniel and Robby and the Cue team - having just finished our launch, it's always stressful in the hours leading up. Rechecking lists, re-reading docs, running through flows again and again. The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing. Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)

lincolnq 14y ago

Wow, this is gorgeous. Nice work. I don't see the calendar entries from my iPhone's calendar - are they supposed to appear? How can I get them?

asarazan 14y ago
iCal support is coming soon. Stay tuned!

calinet6 14y ago

Awesome looking product and a good story of down-to-the-wire work. Great job guys. Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys - http://www.cue.com/ http://www.cue.com/ Probably wanted their domain name too :) Ah, well. Have you had any problems there? I'm always curious about name clashes and how they're dealt with.

tlogan 14y ago

I'm sorry for being a stupid consumer but I still don't understand what cue is doing. I understood Greplin (search everything I have in the cloud), but I don't get what is point of Cue. Which problem does it solve? Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email account.

mitchellhislop 14y ago
Cue puts smarts behind all that data. Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message. When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way. Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.
- ebiester 14y ago
  How did you get it to do that? Does it depend on something being in the calendar? Because it hasn't been able to pick up my trip in July yet.
  - asarazan 14y ago
    Shoot an email to support@cueup.com and we'll look into it.
  - pjscott 14y ago
    We're scraping flight confirmation emails from several airlines, but getting all of the major ones working is challenging. If you've got a flight, it may be with one of the airlines we don't support in production yet. The easiest work-around is to put the trip in Google Calendar; they have a proper API. It sucks that you have to do that much, though. We're working on it. If you have the time, and you're willing to share details over email, we'd love to hear from you at support@cueup.com. Ultimately, we'd like to make a simple open API for various types of events. How cool would it be if (for example) airline companies attached a machine-readable version of your itinerary to the confirmation emails, the same way they send out HTML and text versions? Then you could integrate that with any tools you like. It would be like the "semantic web", except without all the hand-waving and overly-verbose XML stuff. This would be easy to do -- the budget would be peanuts to them -- but in order to get something like that happening, we need to convince those companies that there's a demand for it, that someone would actually use that machine-readable information if they provide it. Our automated email scraping is an attempt to break the chicken-and-egg dilemma, and hasten the spread of open machine-readable data for things that are currently just auto-generated text, by providing a compelling use for it.

languagehacker 14y ago

I think that this blog post is hiding the fact that a team of engineers had their evening robbed from them, at no fault of their own, for something that was ultimately kind of trivial. There are numerous reasons why it's a bad idea to make engineers burn the midnight oil to rush the finishing of a product -- the first among them being Hofstader's law. If your team actually needed an additional day of work, and you didn't already have your product in the bag, you had no good reason to be courting the press in the first place. Mistakes happen in the news cycle. This is usually why you do an unadvertised soft launch shortly before a press release's publication date. This was a lack of due diligence, and not on the part of the engineering staff. I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon. The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days. Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.

kevinclark 14y ago
Engineer at Cue here. This was a team decision. There was no mandate from on high - we're not abused. It was time to ship, so we made it happen.
- 14y ago

yabbadabbadoo 14y ago

Awesome work. Pls add a big, bold link to cueup.com from your blog to make it easier for readers to check out your product.

lucian303 14y ago

If your launches are driven by PR you are in a hopeless situation.

onetwothreefour 14y ago
You're all the way down the bottom here, but there's a lot of truth behind your snark. :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]