Category Archives: dan

Hacking + Customer Support = Fun

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Last week I debugged a fairly interesting issue one of our users was experiencing.  If you’re interested in the details, check out my blog for the 1′s and 0′s.  To summarize the issue: our user was uploading a large file – greater than 2GB – using the HomeField HTTP uploader, and after a couple of minutes their browser was showing a “connection timeout” error.

Although nobody likes application errors, at least users can be informed that something went wrong, and you’re working on fixing it.  Unfortunately with this issue, it looked like we just weren’t answering the phone.  Fortunately, our user and their IT staff were very patient and helpful, which allowed me to get to the bottom of the issue and offer a solution; uploads > 2GB have to be performed on a different computer (the devil is in the details).

I hope our user is as happy as I am to have this figured out.  I enjoy hacking through packets of Internet traffic to discover and understand a new problem (new to me, at least).  Simultaneously solving a problem for a user is icing on the cake.

Happy hacking!

Part 2 of The Startup – the HomeField documentary

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In this episode of The Startup, Joe pitches HomeField – to everyone, everywhere – and Fred Wilson weighs in on the early days of a startup.

Rather watch it in person, with us?!  Come to the screening in NYC on April 19.

The Startup: HomeField Pitch (Chapter 2) on Vimeo by the guys at NYC3.0

Haven’t seen Part 1 yet?

Growing Pains

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We’ve been experiencing tremendous growth this spring. And for that I sincerely thank all of our teams, the new ones and the long time users. Earlier this week we also received some great press from NYC 3.0, Lacrosse Playground, Lacrosse All Stars, and the Twittersphere.

Unfortunately, our servers were unprepared (guess they didn’t read the scouting report on Internet traffic), and TeamHomeField.com slowed to a crawl for a bit late Monday night and then again for a longer period of time Tuesday afternoon.  I take it personally when HomeField isn’t working perfectly and sincerely apologize to all of our users.  Even if you weren’t affected by this, I want to let you know that it did happen.

I’ve been working around the clock to prevent this from happening again.  Last night I quadrupled HomeField’s horsepower and tweaked all of the knobs for better under-the-hood performance.  HomeField has been under close scrutiny all day and hasn’t had a hiccup.  I will continue to be vigilant about the performance of HomeField and make proactive improvements in the future, before any sluggishness is apparent from our users’ perspective.

Thanks for your patience and your continued use of HomeField.