Michele on the Road: on Travel, Photography and Life

It’s been exactly one year since I first introduced 16bugs on this very blog. And it’s been a great experience!

16bugs was my first Rails full-blown app and since then I’ve learnt a lot, both as a developer and as an entrepreneur.
During this year, I established my first company with two of my best friends and released two new apps — Unilife and Pagety. But with that came a much bigger effort from me to keep things running smoothly and, especially in the past few months, I’ve been devoting most of my time to this, while neglecting a bit my social life — blogging included ;) –…shame on me. Yet the thing is I love doing this stuff!

Ahead I see even busier days! We’ll soon start working on a very cool app for a client and on the side we have at least two more we’d like to internally develop.
Plus, I’d like to release a new version of 16bugs as soon as possible which will be RESTful, finally!

Meanwhile, you can enjoy a great offer on both Pagety and 16bugs:

• Use coupon code ‘launchfest’ when upgrading your Pagety account, you’ll get a 50% discount on any plan for up to one year
• If you upgrade your 16bugs account before Sunday, you’ll get an extra month for free

And now for some sleep — which I’m in deep lack of…

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m very excited to introduce you with my new sweet little creature. I’ve been working very hard on it for a good while and now it is ready to see the light.
Here comes 16bugs.

16bugs is a Web application — of course, with a bit of so-called Web 2.0 — for managing a usually tedious and dull task such as bug tracking.

If you’ve ever scouted around for a good bug tracking solution, sure enough you know what all of the available solutions have in common:

1. They’re hard to install, usually needing a custom machine.
2. They’re not intuitive to use for non-developers — and often for developers, too.
3. Most look really bad!

And this is where 16bugs comes in. It tries to fill all those gaps:

1. No need to spend 1 day to install it: it’s hosted!
2. I struggled to make it as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
3. Aren’t those ladybugs lovely?

It’s the first time I attempt something of this kind — I mean on the hosted side of things — so you might see things stumble and fall at the beginning. But rest assured I’ll do everything I can to fix any issue that might — and definitely will thanks to our good friend Murphy — arise.

It definitely isn’t choke-full of features, indeed it’s actually what I tried to avoid. If you’re Apple, Google or Microsoft, you might find it useless. Instead, if you’re a small software development company or a web designer, it might suits your needs perfectly.
Especially web designers don’t need many features, they just need a place where their clients — or anybody else for what this matter — can go to tell what’s wrong: so it needs to be easy to use.

Now I ask you, my fellow readers, to try it out — if you’re interested, of course — and then spread the word — if you like it, of course ;) .
And if you don’t want to do it for me, at least do it for those poor little ladybugs… :)

Update: digg 16bugs! :)