Q&A time!
I figured it might be fun to answer some of the questions that people often ask us in person about RTM – if you’ve got a question that’s not answered here, send it to us, and maybe we’ll do a follow up Q&A post. :)
How many people work on RTM?
It’s just the two of us. :) Two humans, that is – Bob and Cow are of course crucial to the team. Hiroshi also helps us out by writing the Japanese blog (thanks, Hiroshi!).
So who does what?
Omar writes all the code, and there’s a lot of that these days! (We’re up to 213,000 lines of code, including 50,000 lines of JavaScript.) He’s also our sys admin, so he makes sure that the servers are happy. I do all the designy stuff (like the UI), handle support, and (as you may have noticed :) do most of the blogging.
How long have you been working on RTM?
It’s coming up to 4 years… wow, that seems like a long time! It’s weird to think we were 21 year olds when we started – we knew nothing back then (and probably not a whole lot more now! :)
Where are you guys located?
Sydney, Australia. The only bad thing about being in Sydney is the timezone – we try to be awake for daytime in the US (where a lot of RTM users are located), so you could say that we have “interesting” sleep patterns. :)
Are all the RTM servers and stuff in Australia too?
Nope. All our infrastructure is in the US, in datacenters in Dallas and Seattle. This allows RTM to load and function as quickly as possible; we don’t want to slow you down when you’re managing your tasks!
What’s your development environment like?
We develop on both Linux and OS X, use SVN for source control (we’re in the process of switching to Mercurial), and edit with Vim, Emacs, and TextMate. Well, one of us uses Vim… the other uses Emacs, which is obviously better ;)
What language is RTM written in?
Why use one when you can use a whole bunch? :) RTM is a mix of PHP, Python, C, and lots of JavaScript. We use a lot of open source, and also try to give back to the community (more on that in an upcoming blog post!).
Lastly, how do you decide which features to add next?
That’s up to you! While obviously we’re not able to implement every single suggestion that we receive (as much as we would like to please everybody, that would be thousands of features!), we do consider each feedback as we decide what to work on next. Please tell us what you’d like to see. :)
