Topic: Diver's Lounge / When's a Good Time to Dive in The Bahamas?

The simple answer is, anytime is a good time, but it depends on how clear you want the water to be, how prone you are to sea sickness, and what your idea of “cold” is.

In the winter, you’ll need a wet suit to be comfortable, as the seas cool down. In the summers, the water’s so warm you can dive in a swim suit and be just fine. Winter also bring storms, which make large slow rolling waves which are a recipie for sea sickness. The hurricane season brings, well, hurricanes, but the chances of one hitting Nassau (the capitcal) are very slim. Any heaver weather that moves the sea a lot is going to kick up sand and silt from the sea floor and drop visibility, which can drop visibility from 100 feet to 20 feet.

My advice would be the best time to dive is late spring to early summer…but then you’re with all the other people wanting to catch the good weather. Still, provide you can get a hotel, if you’re certified the boat won’t be that crowded if you go on the certified-only trips.

Hope that helps, Neil

Topic: Diver's Lounge / Say Hi!

Welcome to MyNextDive!

My name is Neil, and my buddy Calvin and I created MyNextDive. I live in the US now, but I grew up in the Bahamas where my Dad owns and operates Bahama Divers . All through my summers in college I worked on dive boats and eventually got my PADI Rescue Diver certification.

I’m really excited about getting this site up. Calvin and I are both software engineers specializing in large scale web applications, so when it came time to build our own, I went with what I knew best (outside of information technology) – diving! I brought the idea of a “Scuba Diving Website” (it was a very vague idea in the beginning) to Calvin at the end of 2006, and working together we came up with the worlds first dive travel planning web application.

Hope you enjoy yourself at MyNextDive – if not post what we need to do to fix it. We can’t promise we’ll be able to fulfill all requests, but we sure will try!

—Neil

Topic: Announcements / Moving Servers

We’re unhappy with MediaTemple, so we’re moving to Rails Machine.

—Neil

Topic: Feature Requests / Trip Iteration Coming

Calvin and I just decided that the next feature we need to add is the trip list iteration. We actually have a full list of requirements (complete with screenshots) but we’re not posting it on the forums as it represents quite a bit of (patentable) intellectual property. What’s there not is pretty lame compared to what it’s going to look like in a few weeks.

Behind the sceens, we’re fixing bugs and performance tuning the app. We do the majority of our work over the weekend, so bear with us until we have a chance to get everything fixed, upgraded and deployed.

Thanks for your patience,

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Form fields showing up on "save" at the top of the page

This should be fixed with tonights deployment.

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Form fields showing up on "save" at the top of the page

Whoops! I had an action item to hide the form I use to post data to the server when you hit save, but it feel through the cracks. It’s harmless, but I’ll hide it today.

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Functionality on site list under days

Yes, this is functionality soon to be implimented. I’ll post screenshots of what it’s going to look like soon.

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Profile updates not working

Calvin, that’s all you. We’re using the “Beast” RoR forum, which Calvin shoe horned into our app.

We’re on it.

—Neil & Calvin (mostly Calvin)

Topic: Bug Reports / Visible area of page

Gotcha, will fix.

—Neil

Topic: Announcements / We went Alpha!

Holy Crap – we actually did it. Calvin and I created our first actual not-for-somebody-else application. We’re exausted (I think Calvin’s asleep now) but really excited (stunned?) that we’ve made it this far.

Calvin and I had a rule of thumb: We’d go alpha BEFORE we were comfortable with going alpha. The thought was, if we were comfortable going alpha we’d waited too long. Alpha is supposed to have bugs, so we figured we shouldn’t delay alpha trying to hammer out all the bugs.

The big comprise on my end (I did most of the UI) was to leave out most of the UI bells and whistles.

The big comprise on Calvins end (who did most of the backend) was not to do things like database optimisations, caching, etc.

So, we’re tired, but happy. Glad we made it this far, looking forward to making it to beta. Before we go beta there are lots more features to add, so stay tuned – the best is yet to come.

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Site is slow

We know about this already, and are working about it. There are (at least) several reasons why it’s slow:

1) We’ve not optimised the queries (at all). We’re using Rails’ ActiveRecord to persist large composite object and are making about 100 MySQL queries to load the homepage. We’re going to make it so that there are no DB calls at all when the page loads (all served from Cache).

2) We’re importing about 20 JavaScript files into the homepage, none of which are compressed

3) Our Server setup kinda sucks, we’re switching soon.

Bear with us, we’ll get it sorted out.

—Neil