Hi Frank, I wrote most of the backend for GetchaBooks. Glad you got some value out of the source. Even though I invested a fair amount of time in continuous r

Hi Frank, I wrote most of the backend for GetchaBooks. Glad you got some value out of the source. Even though I invested a fair amount of time in continuous refactoring while actively developing it, refactoring and documenting to a point where I wasn't embarrassed to make it public and could realistically say that someone else would be able to use (which ended up happening with tuftstext.com) and perhaps modify or extend it was a significant learning experience. IIRC I spent a few weeks on that, but I think it was worth it. Instead of setting aside the project with a vague idea of the right way to do some things, I ended up actually having done them the right way, so now when I encounter a similar problem I know how to do it the right way the first time. This is basically the same situation you would face if you were handing off code when leaving a company. This experience is one reason why I think it's important to develop and document your project to open source quality standards throughout the lifetime of the project. And what better way to do that than to open source your code even for an active company? Usually you're probably not competing on tech, and I bet any community contribution you'd get is greater than the likelihood that someone will actually manage to maintain an instance of your code. The books-by-course space is a perfect example of this. So many "startups" have duplicated so much work building these sites, when what you actually need to succeed is marketing. (The thing we took away from it, I think, is that you need per-school branded sites.) They should start sharing resources more. What do you know, here's the college bookstore part of GetchaBooks extracted into an HTTP API, now with parallel scraping, that I just made public on Github: https://github.com/mwhite/bookstore-api https://github.com/mwhite/bookstore-api Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to get working. But expect to get sued.