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.

Neither Sam nor I had ever been to Las Vegas. We descended into the desert on Monday afternoon and took a cab from our airport to the Excalibur Hotel, where we stayed for the Electronics Distribution Show. Along the way we saw a pyramid, the Eiffel tower, and New York skyscrapers before arriving at our hotel, a medieval castle. Operating on a few hours of sleep, we navigated through a maze of slot machines and advertisements until we found our room. Next stop, the Paris hotel and hundreds of electronic parts manufacturers and distributors.

At the show, we walked up and down the isles, laptops in hand, introducing ourselves and giving impromptu demos of the site. Even though we were on the younger side and slightly underdressed, people were happy to talk to us and we amassed a small mountain of business cards. In true Las Vegas fashion, we attended a catered dinner that night featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elvis impersonators singing on stage.

Now its somehow Wednesday and we only have a few hours left of our Vegas trip. We met a lot of friendly people, some of whom were really excited about what we're trying to do. The only problem with the conference was that the big manufacturers and distributors spent most of the conference in private suites conducting private business. Being a physics-dropout doesn't count for much when you are trying to get the attention of billion dollar corporations. We're learning quickly though.

As for what else happened in Vegas... that's between me, Sam and the electronic parts distributors. No seriously, we talked a lot about data feeds and part numbers so you probably don't want to hear about it.

We are happy to announce the inclusion of five more distributors into our search engine: B&D Enterprises, Bisco Industries, Garrett Electronics, Masline Electronics and Nu Horizons. Adding more distributors has been our #1 user request - enjoy!

Over the past few weeks I've been making quite a few phone calls to distributors - so if you're an electronics distributor and haven't received a call from me, shoot me an email. And for our users, stay tuned: there are a few more distributors already in the pipeline.

In related news, Harish and I will be attending the Electronic Distribution Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday May 15th. It should be a stimulating change from our current schedule of coding and...coding some more. We'll take some photos and post them in our upcoming Vegas blog. If you see us at the show, be sure to say hi. We'll be the ones wearing the shirts with the Octopart logo.

We just realized that it's been two weeks since our last blog! I'm so sorry we let so much time go by! Although it might seem like we've stopped working on Octopart, we've actually been working really hard behind the scenes.

I wanted to announce all of our new distributors last week but it turned out to be more difficult to integrate them than we had anticipated. We're making headway though and once they are all in the search results, Sam will blog about them in more detail. Here's a preview of what is coming though: Jameco, Nu Horizons, Future, Masline, B&D, Garrett, Area51 and Brookdale.

The other reason why we have been so quiet is because we spent this past week rewriting our entire backend. This is probably the third time we have re-written a large part of our code and each time it gets better but it is always a frustrating process because you have to stop adding new features to port the old code. The culprit this time was our database interface. We do all of our programming in python without using any of the python-frameworks (Django, TurboGears), and our code was working well for a while but recently development started to feel cumbersome because of all the distributors we are adding. We looked at the existing python frameworks but in the end we decided that they wouldn't give us enough control over our code. Still, we were impressed with the database interface of Django, so we decided to write our own framework to mimic a lot of Django's functionality. It was a great exercise to write our own framework but unfortunately it slowed down our progress temporarily.

Hopefully all of our work over the past couple of weeks will start to pay dividends soon and we can go back to making Octopart more useful to you. We have received emails so far about datasheets, about an expanded part list, about being able to publish projects, about adding more distributors, about parametric search, about pretty pictures, and about expanding to other countries- I think we might need more help soon!