Washtub

Andy and I first built Washtub almost two years ago. In the intervening time, we have basically done no work on it and have never even tried to promote it or officially "launch" it. Other priorities just took over, mostly our work on our one profitable product, StatusGator.

But a recent request from a consulting client made us want to take Washtub off the shelf again. A client asked us to setup a new project for him for development, and specifically asked us to enable Washtub so other developers could pull anonymous data! After only mentioning Washtub a few times in passing, this client remembered it, and saw the value enough to want us to use it.

And, lo and behold, Washtub still works! There were a couple small bugs to work through but Washtub successfully analyzed the data, cleaned it, and pulled it down for local development!

This incident was really motivating to us. We want to dust off the project and see if we can get this client to commit to paying us to use it on all his projects. Maybe 2020 will be the year we finally monetize all the work we put into building this.

After several months of hard work, mostly by Andy, we finally have a working prototype of Washtub. To be honest, we both did not expect to spend this much time to get to a working deployed product. We should have scaled back our ambitions or been more upfront with ourselves about the work involved with this product.

Nonetheless, Washtub is working! Right now, it's for Heroku only which was our intention. Heroku is where we host all of our apps and where our consulting clients do, too.

The process is remarkably slick and we are proud of how it works. You install a command line app, add a token to your Heroku environment, and then run one command. Washtub analyzes your data and decides which tables and columns need to be cleansed of personally identifiable information. You confirm the selections in the web UI, and then run one more command to wash and download your data. It just works!