This morning at 5am Kunal Shah, Nick Dunkman, Jmo and myself launched a new version of the BustedTees website! Visually the site hasn’t changed much. Amir Cohen, one the front end developer for CollegeHumor did an excellent job recoding the front end. We spent the better part of the last 4 months recoding everything from scratch. The original version was built on the open source Symfony PHP framework several years ago (before my time). The site served it’s purpose and helped take BustedTees to a new level, it wasn’t that it was poorly programmed, it just outgrew our requirements.

(Dev Team at 5:15am)

I’m finding that a lot of the open source PHP frameworks that I have experimented with and seen throughout the community just don’t scale well. They serve a purpose and are great for average every day sites. But when dealing with a site the size of a BustedTees or CollegeHumor it really makes sense to roll your own framework, if you can. There are of course instances when writing a framework from scratch doesn’t always make sense. In the “unsure” startup setting it sometimes makes sense to get something out there quick and worry about scaling later. Scaling is a GREAT problem to have. If you are going to use open source code, not just frameworks, it’s important to really understand the underlying code. I can bet most coders don’t have a clue how the open source code they use actually works. Some of these applications are coded by excellent developers, you might learn something new by just reading their code.

Working on BustedTees has been an incredible experience and I have learned so much. I have worked on some small ecommerce sites as a freelance developer, but nothing of this size. Theres so many things I would have never thought needed to be accounted for. In future posts I will try and elaborate a bit. Right now I’m running on a few hours of sleep I got from a nap, so I’m going to pass out…