PlanningPuca: How to get from here to there WRITTEN BY Daniel Miller

Hi everyone and welcome to Planning Puca, the newest addition to the regular PucaTrade blog and another peek behind the curtain of how things work here at your favorite trading website.

My name is Dan Miller (or just Miller, if you’re into the whole brevity thing) and I’m in charge of Operations here at PucaTrade. In my professional life I have been in the field of general operations for the last several years. I really love Ops (especially in small companies), because it gives me the chance to learn from a wide variety of people while helping them all meet our team’s goals. For example, here at PucaTrade, the umbrella of Operations includes the functions of Human Resources, budgeting, project & office management, and planning, just to name a few. I spend my time making sure that the case admins, programmers, and designers on our fine website can stay focused on delivering the best PucaTrade experience possible to our trading community without being distracted by the countless distractions that can get in the way.

Since my first day on the job, the biggest topic of internal conversation and focus has been the development and launch of Future Site. When I came on board the team had a clear technical plan of how to execute this ambitious project and wanted someone to help coordinate the actual development of the site.

This project is incredibly interesting for a lot of reasons; partially because it’s going to be such a departure from traditional M:tG sites in both function and aesthetic, but also because it’s so much more than just a technical development project. In every step of the plan, design, and implementation of Future Site, our members have been at the forefront of our mind. Understanding our community’s goals and providing for their best interests has been our priority since day one.

Over the last six months the updates we’ve given on our progress have developed in conjunction with the work we have accomplished on the site. To start this series off I’ll be recapping some of the challenges we’ve faced both in the development of the site, and subsequently in keeping our community in the loop.

When I joined the team in September of 2015, much of the planning for Future Site had been completed over the Spring and Summer thanks to a successful IndieGoGo campaign raising the funds we needed to begin development on the site. This was an interesting challenge in itself that bears a brief mention: the money we raised allowed us to begin planning out exactly how we would accomplish the lofty goals we had set, however, we quickly realized that we had drastically underestimated the cost of the project. The fundraising boost allowed us to make significant progress in a very short amount of time, but past a certain point the speed that we could build this site was governed by the resources we generated as a modestly profitable company.

In addition to working to intelligently allocate the resources at our disposal, there were also more mundane obstacles to work through. For most of the Spring our office was under construction. If you’ve ever experienced a workspace in upheaval, you’ll know its impact to a team’s productivity. Running PucaTrade does not mix well with dust, noise, and the general bustle of construction. In June the level of disruption reached the point that we had to relocate to a temporary coworking space, uprooting the entire team for months.

Not the most productive space to work. Time to find some new digs while this gets worked out.

Despite all of this, by September the team not only knew how they could actually make the idea of Future Site come true, but we also had a useable framework for the site.

PucaTrade's New Search Page from PucaTrade, Inc. on Vimeo.

A promo video made by Eric showing off the actual functionality of Future Site circa early September ‘15.

This is really impressive for a tech team of four people developing a never-before attempted trading platform which would fit within PucaTrade’s model of asynchronous trading. If there were any doubts, I’m here to tell you that the PucaTrade team is really good at what they do. Here’s an abbreviated list of just some of the features we designed or built:

New designs for every page on the site to accommodate the new features, including Profile, Dashboard, Sending, Receiving, Ledger, Haves, Wants, Watch, Profile, Settings, Case Creation,Open Cases, the Admin Dashboard, the Landing Page, Login/create account, Tour, Search, Premium signup, Payment, Send Points, Articles, Trends, and a whole host of modal screens allowing for cards to be added to any of your lists; and then, most of these pages were tweaked and redesigned again for MTGO.

Mobile optimisation for the Live site (you can see this by logging on to PucaTrade from any mobile device today!)

The ability to upload a photo through case messaging

New visual displays for cards in all different states throughout the site (remember, you’ll need to be able to tell at a glance not only what set a card is from, but what language and condition it’s in)

A brand new search function allowing cards, users, and trades to be looked up from anywhere on the site with ease.

This was the situation heading into the Fall: after a Summer spent planning, it was time to focus solely on building the site and preparing it for public release. Still acclimating to my new job I got together with the tech team to begin early stage organization. One of our first steps was to start getting the entire team together for weekly planning meetings. Up until this point the company had been small enough for communication to happen from one desk to the next, but as we grew as a company it became harder and harder to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction.

During this time, Mitch and I sat down to translate the tasks from our Summer planning into a timeline. This work would inform our understanding of when we would be close to releasing Future Site 1.0, which features would make the cut for release, and which would be scheduled for later updates.

As our timeline began to take shape we found that we were surprisingly far along in the development process, but a lot remained to be done. We had the ability to trade digital cards and test trades successfully. We implemented a working messaging system. We introduced visual card displays giving users the ability to adjust cards for desired languages and conditions. We even finagled a new case resolution system and were working to build it. All this was accomplished by a two member tech team while simultaneously keeping the live site up and running (no small feat in and of itself). Much of the core functionality of the site was useable but still pretty buggy.

With this knowledge, we began rolling out more promotional teasers to give everyone a sense of what was coming down the pipeline (you might have seen these on our Future preview page). With more development work and planning throughout December, we started to discover that, though we had made significant progress, we uncovered more unforeseen work every week and needed to revise our internal expectations around a release. This is one of the reasons we have not published an exact release date: we knew from experience that projects of this scale commonly run into unforeseen hurdles. The team discovered this phenomenon two years prior during the development of Revised (the current version of the site). We knew that Future Site would be an even larger step into the unknown and a final date for release was simply impossible to estimate accurately.

Over the course of the Winter we worked to develop the new site as we dialed in our organizational processes. More annoying roadblocks continued to slow us down however, not the least of which was our temporary workspace losing its lease, causing us to uproot and move office again. This time we were working out of the basement of Chris’ house (for those following along, there isn’t much space for whiteboards there either). We spent February there until construction in our original workspace concluded. March 1st, after our third full-office move in less than seven months, we returned to the place our playgroup refers to as PucaTower.

Downtown Oakland as seen from PucaTower. We keep the Street Fighter cabinet turned off during work hours for productivity reasons ;)

So, what’s next? I’ve spent the last few weeks prepping the team to jump into a pared-down Agile development process. For those who aren’t familiar with what this means, I’ll likely discuss it in an upcoming article more thoroughly. The (very) abbreviated explanation is that a web development team following Agile processes make it their goal to regularly create concrete, deliverable products in short project “sprints” of focused work.

For Future Site, this doesn’t mean that we’re planning to release condition support in two weeks, and non-English support two weeks after that. We are developing in a very intricate environment where features are interdependent upon one another in order to work at all. MTGO support wasn’t designed to work on the version of the site you’re using today: it relies on our new site design, which itself only uses the new case resolution process, which requires the existence of Package Trading, and so on and so forth.

What these focused Sprints do mean is that moving forward, our development process will be much easier to communicate to the PucaTrade community than it has been previously. So that’s the goal of this series: I’ll be checking in and giving you all updates biweekly, letting you know where the team is on future site development and what we still have left to do. As a teaser, check out this snapshot of our first (very full, very messy) project board as we head into bug testing.

Our first sprint board in progress… expect to see plenty more regular updates on our progress!

I’ll be back in two weeks with info and updates on how we’re doing and more on Planning all things Puca!

PS. As a bonus, here’s a glimpse at our project board at the end of week 1. Look at all those "Done" tasks! Did I mention how hard this team rocks?