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!