I wrote about CommandShift3 before. Late last week I wrapped up a conversation with a core member of Jelly New York City and instrumental member of the CommandShift3 team, Darrell Silver.

Darrell does Jelly around his day job in the financial industry. He hosted the Jelly where the team conceived of CommandShift3. Given the challenge of a day job, Darrell was clear that “Commandshift3 would not have happened it it hadn’t been for Jelly”.

In this second take, I brain-dump some of the technical and operational details behind CommandShift3.

Technology

The current generation of web technology is extremely efficient at taking a simple idea from concept to implementation. CommandShift3 is a standard LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) application. With one small exception, the entire application runs on top of Amazon S3 and EC2. The one exception is screenshot generation, which is done on a Mac. The decision to go with S3 and EC2 was made early (right after lunch on day one, in fact) based on the ease of provisioning servers. They current use one EC2 instance.

Team

Six members of Jelly were involved in the initial product concept: Erin Sparling, Amit Gupta, Darrell Silver, Lee Semel, Dan Lurie and Adam Varga. Erin, Amit, Darrell, and Lee completed the implementation.

The project took 4 to 5 weeks from domain registration to launch (Guy Kawasaki, I think they beat you by a couple weeks). The first day of work lasted from lunch until 2am the next morning. The implementation team wrapped the project up over the next few weeks, utilizing their time outside of work (and outside of Jelly).

Future

CommandShift3 was intended purely for ‘fun’. At 1M page-views in the first month, it has the potential to transcend fun. From Darrell’s perspective, it went from fun to something big when people started returning to check on their designs and to check on the rankings of the competition; and when people started making feature requests (a good indicator of utility).

What’s next? According to Darrell they’ve tossed a few ideas around, including the CS3 Awards oriented toward design.

- Bandit