Colevault is Dead! Long Live Colevault!
As a certain Mr. Twain once said, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Well, not my death of course, but the “death” of this blog. And not even death really, but a state of inactivity so profound as to closely resemble death. (I must admit to being a bit surprised that so many friends and family members actually complained about the lack of posts.) But fear not, gentle readers, Colevault is alive and kicking and coming at you live with what will hopefully be a torrent of updates over the next few weeks. You see, when I started this thing I knew there would often be long lapses between posts. A 16-month-old baby in the prime of his fun-ness, a job that openly scoffs at the idea of a 40 hour work week, and the massive ongoing remodel of the Colevault Mansion (not to be confused with the Sports Guy Mansion), these things have effectively banished the Artist Formerly Known as Free Time from my life. And when I do have some free time, my priority is to simply relax and enjoy life with family and friends, which I’ve managed to do recently and will be posting about shortly.
While none of the above will be changing any time soon, I recently hit a milestone at work which has momentarily freed up a bit of time for the luxury of writing. The project I’ve been working on non-stop for the past few months finally launched on June 29. Vacation Rentals is the latest category (or “vertical” as we like to call them) we’re tackling at Vast.com, the first new one since our initial launch of cars, jobs, and personals back in March. And this was kind of a big deal for me because I was the product manager for Vacation Rentals, meaning I was more or less responsible for coordinating the whole process, from the initial specs, to interface decisions, to marshalling the appropriate engineering resources, finding an endless array of bugs, removing spam, and on and on. And since this is an entirely new career direction for me the learning curve was pretty steep, which meant I needed to put in some serious hours just to keep my head above water. Thankfully we’ve got a fantastic team and they were able to knock it out in spite of the occasional misdirection of a rookie product manager!
But I do think Vacation Rentals turned out quite well. You can read the official launch announcement in my post on the Vast blog as well as this piece of good press we received. You can also check out this great article from Business 2.0. There are a couple of minor inaccuracies but overall it paints a good picture of our little startup, to be known henceforth as the The Mighty Micro-Multinational. It’s an apt moniker: Vacation Rentals actually went live while I was on a plane on my way back from Belgrade where I met our overseas team for the first time. In addition to 3/5 of our San Francisco office, our 1-man Irish team was also there, as well as several of our engineers from outside Belgrade, and lastly our new development manager, who’s commuting to SF from Austin, Texas but happened to be at a wedding in Northern Italy, just a short flight from Belgrade. (All we were missing is our lead engineer who’s in the Dominican Republic.)
But I digress. So… I highly recommend that you try out Vast the next time you’re planning a trip. (Or buying a car, or finding a job, or looking for a date!) You can find vacation rental listings in over 100 countries from thousands of different web sites, so wherever you’re going you’ll find a cool place to stay on our site.
So with vacation rentals out the door I theoretically should have some more time for blogging. But of course there’s plenty more work to do - no rest for the weary - so we’ll see how it goes. Realistically if I want to blog more I’ll have to sleep less. Which is what I’m doing right now. Does that clock really say 12:30?