When we first started working on Octopart we never intended to keep a blog. It didn't make sense to us why a search engine needed a blog, so we just didn't bother. The first blog entry that I ever wrote was when I dropped out of Grad School this past February. It was right before we launched Octopart and I did it mainly to tell my friends when and why I quit. From that blog post I got tons of emails from people congratulating me (and telling me that I'm crazy) and we realized how powerful a blog can be.

If you've been using Octopart for awhile then hopefully you've noticed that we added more functionality to the blog page and made it look a bit better. I'm proud to say that it was written in less than a day. This actually means a lot - we spent the past several weeks completely rewriting our backend and are finally finished. Although this looks like a simple little blog entry it was actually written on an entire application that can be easily ported and scaled. The fact that I wrote this app in a day means that the past few weeks of coding were well worth it. Now we can finally get back to improving our search results and adding the new features that you have been asking for.

We have come to really enjoy blogging and would like to turn this into something much more ambitious and something much more useful to our users. We will keep writing about trade shows and the growing pains of a young startup but we also want to start writing about cool new technologies, hacks, or interesting projects people are working on. Unfortunately, we are working on software full-time so when it comes to hardware you will have to help us out. If you have a neat project that you want to talk about, send me an email and we'll post your blog entry up here for everybody to see. Shameless plugs are encouraged, shiny pictures even more so and you don't have to mention Octopart in a single line.