xenowang

I was expecting this one!

The past 2 years have taught me a lot of hard lessons in product management, setting expectations, and how public you want to make certain promises. There's no doubt that we've fallen short on a lot of what we originally said to do. It's been a combination of hubris, naivete, and inexperience.

Related to your second question: it was a matter of observing user behavior and understanding what opportunities ahead of us existed. When we realized that there was a real, vibrant community emerging on Fitocracy, one with its own unique identity and personality, we decided to cultivate and nurture it as much as possible. And so far, it seems like this was the right decision... as our engagement numbers are unusually high for the category and to date, very few other fitness apps can claim the same dynamic that exists on Fitocracy.

As for the RPG features themselves, without divulging too much*, we are aiming to bring a bit of what was originally promised into the next big iterations. The major theme will be about guiding you along your journey, whatever that might be.

*Unfortunately can't provide as much detail as I would like because, well for one, I already noted how promises usually doesn't add value for anyone involved and secondly, as visibility has increased, our competitors have started to watch us more closely and in some cases have even copied parts of our roadmap.

Shouldn't you be working?

The short answer here is that the scoring system is "dumb." It doesn't take your workout history into account and thus cannot tell if a heavy single is your 1RM or simply you ramping up to heavier weights. As a result, there are bound to be dynamics that don't make sense in the grand scheme of things. We do aim to make the system more intelligent as soon as we can, but that requires more engineering resources, which we do not currently have.

Django

MySQL

AWS

Javascript / jQuery / Backbone

CSS via LESS

Celery for tasks queuing

New Relic for server monitoring

Git/Github for version control

Fabric and custom scripts for deployment

Liquor

I believe that's known as "other cardio" in Fito-land :)