Man.  This is a podcast.  Boy golly.

With @raislak, @pauld, @teenydvl, and @sikkdays.

Yo Gabba Gabba “We Are the Robots” from Mixtape Club on Vimeo.

They’re programming our children to love robots.  Also, I had a dream recently about an oven with arms – and it did not end with Will Smith saving the day.  It did not end well at all, actually.

Now is a better time than ever to invest in Robot Insurance.

Following that first successful cycle, we decided to wait through New Year’s, 2007 to open a new cycle.  This gave me a nice, solid month to work away at the site, polishing away the last few bugs, and generally getting things locked down for production.

I settled in, the second week in December of ‘06, to start patching up these past few bugs.  What I quickly found, however, was that this software was nigh-unpatchable.  Every time I’d try to add or remove a feature, everything would break.  I don’t mean a couple error messages would show up – I mean the page would simply not appear.  Locked up.  No errors in the log.  Dead.

The Oklahoma software, you see, was built over several years, by people who were not professional programmers.  They were students and foodies – and they did admirable work.  Yet, there was not a consistent design standard or vision, and the result of that was a big ball of “spaghetti code” – code that’s great when the sauce is on it, but is awful if you need to change out specific noodles.  (So that metaphor doesn’t work right.  Oh well.)  Plus, even they still considered the whole package “beta” – and not the “works really well Google-style” beta, either.

On top of that, the OK software had features we didn’t need to support.  Their system is state-wide, and involves a whole transportation network.  This means that farmers can drop off on one side of the state, volunteers then take apart the deliveries and load them onto trucks destined for other cities, and finally a day later everybody picks up their assembled orders from all over Oklahoma.  Cool?  Yes.  But even then, we knew we weren’t going in that direction.  We’re the West Michigan Co-op – not the Lower Peninsula Co-op.  Not the All-of-Michigan Co-op.

This turned out to be a huge part of their software – drop-off points, pick-up points, destination preferences, etc.  And that code was intertwined in every single file of the site – again, spaghetti code.  On top of that, some of the source files were nearly a thousand lines of code individually!  Not maintainable, and thus not sustainable.

It took me about a day of futile busywork on this jumble before I finally threw the code in the trash can.  Bear in mind – we had already used this software.  It kinda worked.  And it was “finished.”  Here I was, ready to start again, from scratch.  What was I doing?

At the time, I had recently stumbled upon a PHP framework called CakePHP.  If you’re a web programmer, you may have heard of it, or the framework it’s modeled after, Ruby on Rails.  If you’re not a programmer, I’ll just say this: CakePHP is essentially a library of code that you can build websites with.  It’s designed to interact with databases similar to the one we had built with the Oklahoma software.  It’s also designed for rapid development – meaning you can build an interactive site fast.

I didn’t tell any of the other founders that I had done this – in fact, I left the old code up on the server just in case I couldn’t get it done.  Farmers need the site to still be up anyway, just so they could update their product information.  But at home, on my local server, I was crunching away, ten hours a day, rebuilding the Co-op software, piece by piece.  I worked a solid three weeks on the new software.

It was definitely a stressful time.  But at the end of the three weeks, I had 95% of what the Co-op needed already implemented.  So I took the plunge, and announced to Jerry, Gail, and Tom that I had killed the old code and started from scratch using this framework as a base.  I published the site – which to the naked eye, looked exactly the same.  Ordering wasn’t ready to go yet, but you could log in, farmers could maintain their product listings, and best of all, the back-end code was organized and solid.  In fact, I even had RSS feeds of new products – something the old code wouldn’t have been able to do, probably ever, without writing a whole RSS library and SQL query from scratch.

By the time we opened for ordering in January of ‘07, the last few features had been implemented.  There were certainly a few bugs that first cycle with the new code, but over all, the ordering cycle went far smoother.  Compared to the previous software, this was definitely less capable overall.  Personally, this was a blessing, because it actually did what it was supposed to do – and nothing more.  There weren’t any confusing options we weren’t using getting in the way.  Best of all, of course, was that I had nice, stable, organized code to build on.

I really don’t believe that I touched the code for the rest of January.  It was exactly the same code in February – which was my test to make sure I hadn’t screwed up some strange time-related function.  The January and February cycles went pretty well, considering the volume – which was rapidly increasing.  I think we broke $1000 that February.

Jerry designed some very nice looking PDF invoices, which we quickly adopted.  I’ve found on numerous occasions that it’s practically impossible to get different browsers on different systems to print the same HTML page the same way.  Why this is, I have no idea, but that’s how it is.  (It can be done, but it takes an incredible about of debugging.  Generating a PDF, on the other hand, is trivial by comparison.)

Since then there have been lots and lots of features added to the software – product photos via Flickr, forums, a product search API, and lots of minor changes – but getting these new features has never caused a significant break in the software or restructuring.  I’ve also open-sourced the code, to help others like the Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend, Indiana get started.  Like Oklahoma, I want to get others building their own local, online marketplaces.

The story will continue in “Structuring the Co-op.”

In the Left Channel, we have the @sikkdays, the @RymzWiTerminatr, the @raislak, and MC @pauld.

In the Right Channel, we have @teenydvl, @ItsLynzi, and their mom.

Good luck listening! Might I call your attention to the “Pan” knob?

I don’t think that the real story of how this adventure began has ever really been documented, so I’m going to attempt to do so here, at least from my point of view.  I’m don’t intend to put this on the Co-op Wiki, simply because I will undoubtedly present a biased view, based on my perspective and knowledge, but I will try to stay away from bias when it seems obvious.  As our mothers used to say, if you can’t say something nice… etc.

This also happens to chronicle my life, to some extent, for the past few years.  My involvement in the Co-op has led to about half the jobs I currently do, which have definitely helped me grow as an individual.  I sometimes get asked if I go to a church; though I am a person of faith, I don’t attend a church at present.  I perceive my involvement in the Co-op as an equivalent; I have been tried and tested,  I have made sacrifices, and I have given my time (and money) for a cause I deeply believe in – and it has rewarded me in kind, though almost never directly.  If that’s not bordering on church or religion, I don’t think you know what church or religion really are.  (And if you don’t feel personally and spiritually rewarded by your involvement with your church, you’re doing it wrong.)

So although I am tempted to begin this story in a Zeeland hospital, June of 1981, I’ll skip ahead to the true beginning of the Co-op’s (and my) story.  The idea of an online co-operative in West Michigan had been floating around for some time before and in 2006, as I understand it, between Gerard Adams, Tom Cary, and Gail Philbin, each of whom has their own role in this story.  The idea formed shortly after the Co-op storefront in East Grand Rapids closed up.  I don’t believe any of those three had any real connection with that Co-op aside from being members, but they did feel it was a loss for the city as a whole.

I became involved through Gail; or, I should say, through Gail’s husband, John.  John was my Film professor (and mentor) at GVSU at the time.  I had very recently graduated, but I spoke with and saw John regularly.  Gail, Tom, and Jerry had tracked down some software from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, who were willing to share their software as open source.  However, none of them were technically savvy as programmers or web developers.  John knew I was a programmer at one time, and called me one night to ask if I could help.  I agreed, and Gail offered to pay me $100 out of her pocket to set up a server and get the software installed.

Shortly thereafter – June of 2006 – Gail, Tom, Jerry, and I all met at WMEAC to discuss setting up the software, and getting everything moving.  We met several times over the next few months, figuring out how the ordering, pick-up, and drop-off would work.  Although there was some discussion at that time of creating a real structure – that is, an incorporated, not-profit business structure – we often shunted those questions to a later meeting.  Our focus for the first few months set the tone for the next three years of co-op operation: Make It Work.

Most of our discussions at these meetings centered around the farmers we wanted to bring in.  Would it be too much work for them?  Could we convince them that we had a marketplace they could realistically use to make money?  Was this more complicated than a Farmer’s Market, and how much more?  Would they do it?  Strangely, I don’t think we ever really approached anybody to pick their brains.  In retrospect, I think we were worried that they would reject the concept before it even was implemented, unless we simply put it together and let them try it.

I also remember startlingly long conversations about the names and groupings of categories.  What were important categories to give our producers?  How did their products fit into them?  The biggest one I can remember is “Eggs & Dairy.”  Why are they together?  Well, they’re always together at the supermarket.  But why on an online co-op?  Because you’re shopping for food, let’s make the metaphor work.  It’s still set up that way: and the only two subcategories of “Eggs & Dairy?”  Eggs, and Cheese.  We should have just called the category “Omelet Ingredients” – we could have had more subcategories that way.

It became quickly obvious that Gail was going to be the communicator of this bunch.  From our first talking in June of ‘06 until today, I have almost 1000 conversations (with multiple emails each) in my Gmail archive from her alone.  In fact, early in the process, I set up a filter for her incoming emails so that I could group all the Co-op related info together in one place.  (I still use this trick on clients that like to client-spam my inbox.  That way, other projects don’t interfere with what I’m working on at the moment, and when I am working on their project, all the info is in one box.)  We nicknamed Gail “The Cat Herder.”

Jerry had assigned his intern at Media Rare to come up with a design, which was given to me fairly early into the work.  I got down to business between June and November of 2006 taking the OK Food Co-op software and grafting our look onto it.  I spent a decent amount of time trying to fine-tune the site’s product entry process for our farmers – they were going to be using the site to input their products directly.  Tom used his connections with the Local Food Guide to recruit farmers. In order to help them out, Gail collected information from all the farmers and our select few test members, and Jerry and I got their accounts set up in the system for them.  By the end of November, we had the farmers entering their products, and prepping for our first attempt at making this work.  The software was a mess, but it worked for the time being, and it had a bizarre kind of organization that I had gotten to know by this time.  The farmers were pleasantly receptive; there’s nothing like a horrible economy to make folks open to new markets, no matter how difficult or experimental it is to get there.

We used the OK Food Co-op software the first and only time in December of 2006 – our first order cycle.  The first morning of ordering, I fixed no less that thirty bugs – their software was simply not meant to be portable, and we only had time for limited testing.  If worst came to worst, we’d cancel all the orders and start over.

However, after that morning, things were very smooth, and such drastic measures were never needed.  If I recall, we did about $600 worth of business that first month.  It seemed like a lot at the time, having never done this before; we now do over $12,000 a month.  The exchanging of goods took place in the back room at Alger Heights Foods, a small neighborhood grocery store.  The store was trying to move in the direction of local and organic food; I don’t know that the owner ever took that idea seriously, but his wife did, and she had enough pull with her husband to let us use their stockroom for two nights a month.

This first goods exchange was a one-day process.  The farmers all dropped off in the morning, Dec. 9, and the customers all picked up that evening.  It was, for lack of a better word, chaos.  Invoices were printed strangely – everybody’s came out differently.  Some had the correct prices, others didn’t.  Already, we had one or two folks who had forgotten to pick up.  I know Tom stayed a good three hours after the last customer had gone to try to reconcile the books – and at this time, we hadn’t even collected membership fees, or surcharge, so any money that we were short was going to come out of our pockets.

All in all, though, it went alright.  I met quite a few new people, in a totally different social setting than I had ever been in before.  We weren’t short, and the farmers and customers seemed pretty happy.  Later that month, the Philbins held a Christmas party, at which Gail gave me an extra $100, again, out of her own pocket, as a present for helping with everything.  It was not expected – but it is still appreciated.  For the record, this $200 I received from Gail, $100 from the start and $100 from Christmas in 2006, was the only money I received for doing work on the Co-op until March of 2009, and I believe I used $35 of it to purchase the domain name, westmichigancoop.com.

After that first ordering cycle, I figured a few hours worth of fine tuning on the site, and it would be ready to go, full time, and that I wouldn’t need to touch it again.  Right.

The story will continue in “Rewriting the Co-op.”