Jul

31

Falling From Much Higher Than Here

Filed Under business, life | 2 Comments

I ran across a pretty amazing story about one of the most “hated” CEOs of the “dotcom” world, Julie Wainwright, CEO of pets.com (you know, the sock puppet company). Although she doesn’t really go into why her company failed, she illustrates 5 mistakes that she had made in the last seven years of her life, and how she moved past them.

Here is an excerpt that totally blew me away:

As the public CEO, I failed, and it was a very public failure. In fact, I was labeled one of the biggest failures ever. How bad was it? I had people laugh in my face when I introduced myself for years after the company closed. It happened as recently as a year ago. A couple of people asked me what it felt like to be one of the best-known failures in the U.S. Most just walked away from me. One woman told me to my face that I was a loser. I could go on and on, but you get the point: I became a symbol for something greater than myself, and we aren’t talking puppet envy here.

That is pretty intense. What a reputation (or lack thereof) to have in a very public way. Thinking about my company and our current growth and blessings, I can’t even imagine how she must have felt. Its almost a gamble, right? Entrepreneurs put themselves out there and really try to change the world in some way, and whichever way their scale tips, really does effect something much greater than themselves.

Julie has moved past her problems and has moved on to her new role as CEO for SmartNow.com. I’d like to take a moment to say congratulations to Julie Wainright for having a pretty amazing amount of determination to do better for herself, and I wish her the best in her new venture.

Congrats, Julie!

Jul

28

Conferences

Filed Under conferences, life, technology | 1 Comment

This year, I’ve been attending more conferences than I had originally expected to. Although, I was disappointed I was not able to attend cf.objective this year (probably will be next, though), I was able to find a ton of interesting conferences, without having to leave the Bay Area! Really, my biggest inhibitor is cost of flying and general expenses revolving around travel (isn’t that everyone’s problem?). So, Its been a nice surprise to see there are a few great opportunities right here.

Here is a list of conferences I’ve been to and will be attending this year:

Start Conference (August 7th, 2008, $200)
This conference is located in San Fransisco, CA (at the fort mason center). Its all about Entrepreneurs and startup-y topics. Should be a lot of fun! Not too expensive either!

Start is a one-day conference in San Francisco designed for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.

You’ll hear from founders of successful startups, and learn from investors, lawyers, and others who can outline potential pitfalls. They’ll give you practical advice, tell their horror stories, and maybe lend you a little inspiration. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking the plunge, don’t miss this chance to hear from the experts!

Google IO (May 28th-29th, 2008, $400)
This was a fun concert. I am hoping my entire team will join me next time. I learned all about a ton of Google technologies, and even some more generic topics such as AJAX and web optimization techniques. This is a really fun conference (at the San Francisco Mascone Center) that will definitely be around next year…probably even bigger than the last! They treat you like you work for them while you are there, all meals free (and good), tons of candy (free), bean bags everywhere, pool tables, and an amazing after party (open bar) with video games and a concert by Flight of The Conchords…it was fantastic!

Google I/O is a developer gathering focused on pushing the boundaries of web applications using Google and open web technologies. Google engineers and web development leaders will lead you through two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies, hands-on Code Labs, and informal Q&A at Fireside Chats.

LinuxWorld (August 4th-7th, 2008, Free!)
The attraction for me to this conference is the free price tag. Its absolutely free to just walk the gigantic expo hall, which is always filled with free handouts, software, knowledge, and fun! One year I got to ride a mechanical bull that was running on a linux-powered USB stick, I won an iPod Shuffle for my efforts :).

Next year, I hope to attend either RailsConf 2009 and/or RubyConf 2009. I’d like to see how one of these goes, maybe…if I can swing it…a conference overseas? That would be fun! We’ll see.

Jul

24

Moving Into The 21st Century: VoIP

Filed Under business, life, music, recommendations, technology | 4 Comments

When we first moved into our offices on Milvia street, we tried to keep costs low and used our cell phones insetad of buying into a couple of land lines w/ conventional phone service. This worked fine in the beginning, our needs were humble. For the most part, the cell was great, except reception in our building was definitely not consistent, nor reliable.

As we began to do more work with clients and move into new areas of work, we started to rely on our phones a bit more. We also had run into the need to send and receive faxes more than I think we should (anyone heard of e-mail? :)). Basically, it became clear to us that we needed to figure out some sort of phone solution.

At first, I was hesitant to buy into the whole concept of VoIP, even though countless people had recommended it for startups. We don’t have the fastest internet, and our stupid router didn’t support QoS until very recently, so that was another big deterrent to the idea for me. Altough, I was not able to find a conventional phone service that I thought made decent fiscal sense…AT&T wants a pretty hefty commitment for even the simplest plans, I just wasn’t happy with the idea of it. And also, what about PBX type features? Extensions would be nice, how about voicemail? $$$

So, this was becoming a mess for me, once I decided to bite the bullet and find a VoIP provider, which ones are legit? Packet8? Vonage? (short answer, no). I happened to stumble upon a company named Aptela, and started looking into their features. Call trees, extensions, digital faxing (what a concept!), unified messaging, the whole gamut basically. For a very affordable price! We dove in and decided to give them a shot, its something like $60 bucks a month for everything mentioned above.

The system only works with IP phones, so we purchased a couple of $100 Polycom handsets, plugged them in, and suddenly…the stars had aligned and we had a working phone system! To be honest, I was completely amazed with how easy it was to setup, and how great it sounds, even while dowloading large files! (thank you, QoS). Aptela is a fantastic service, so far I have had absolutely no complaints. Everything is 100% web-based and works just fine on my mac, as it should.

So long story short, If you are looking for an affordable, solid VoIP solution, I recommend Aptela!

Jul

22

Wordpress For the iPhone

Filed Under apple, life, technology | 1 Comment

Wordpress has just released version 1.0 of their mobile blogging application for the iPhone. At first, the thought of blogging with any substance from my iPhone was kind of funny, but quite frankly, they’ve designed a tool that is awesome at doing just that.

One of the coolest things about it, is its ability to work with not only Wordpress blogs from wordpress.com, but ALSO custom installs! Thank you XML-RPC! You can also manage multiple blogs via the application.

You have the ability to write drafts, and save them locally to your iPhone, you can edit and manage drafts or previously published articles from your iPhone, and you can even take pictures on the fly and post them! How neat! One thing I wish it had that it does not, however, is the ability to manage comments. It’d be nice to be able to approve comments on the road if I needed to.

All in all, a must have if you are a Wordpress user, very impressed with this application!

Jul

11

Data Sharding and Replication in Ruby

Filed Under apple, ruby, technology | 4 Comments

The good peole at FiveRuns have just recently released a gem to the Ruby community that allows their ActiveRecord-managed data models to now have built-in sharding and/or replication functionality…with just a few lines of code!

What do I mean by Data Sharding? Read on:

Specifically we needed two features to scale our mysql database: application-level sharding and master/slave replication. Sharding is the process of splitting a dataset across many independent databases. This often happens based on geographical region (e.g. craigslist) or user account (e.g. flickr). Replication provides a near-real-time copy of a database which can be used for fault tolerance and to reduce load on the master node. Combined, you get a scalable database solution which does not require huge hardware to scale to huge volumes.

They call this new gem, DataFabric. DataFabric makes it super simple (and DRY) to make your application scales to multiple database shards, or even just provide basic replication to different database servers if you so choose.

For me, the idea of having something so complex as data sharding built into the core of ActiveRecord is absolutely fascinating! You don’t have to have any sort of mysql_proxy business, or other strange DRb services running in the background, just essentially plug and play.

Jul

2

In The Cloud

Filed Under technology | Leave a Comment

Lately, I’ve been doing a bunch of research around cloud computing, for no other reason other than I find it genuinely interesting. At my company, we’ve invested some money in dedicated servers for our staging and production application environments, and cloud computing offers a lot more flexibility, for a lot less, it seems on the surface.

The general equation is, cost per instance/hour. Which means 2 servers, at $0.10 an hour, is a grand total of $0.20! That’s not bad, but keep in mind, application servers run 24/7, so imagine the equation being more like 0.10*(2*72), that’s more like it. Bandwidth cost is also extremely low, its about on par with what we pay now, but also, its on a “pay as you need” basis, so we actually save costs if we are using them less, much more granular.

But what can you do with the cloud? Well, that was my initial question, what are the constraints? Basically, there are none. I have been doing most of my experimentation on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Once you’ve got an account setup, you simply choose from their library of Amazon Machine Images (or AMIs), and define an instance for yourself of that AMI, as simple as a shell command! Seconds later, you’ve got a Debian, or CentOS, or even Windows server ready to take orders! Wow! Accounts come with nice features such as elastic VLANs, allowing account-level firewall protection, as well as elastic IPs which you can use to do some very interesting load balancing techniques, all of this power available to you for very little upfront cost. Its literally as simple as I’ve explained it, I was amazed at how quickly I was commandeering multiple debian instances in my account!

So whats the catch, there is always one, right? Indeed there is. If you shutdown or “terminate” an instance of an EC2 cloud, you will actually lose all applications and data. Most people would say, well come on, thats crap! How do you expect me to run a server on that!? Well, to that I say, how often have you completely powered down a remote server without having it reboot? The saving grace here is that reboots actually retain the application and data, you only lose it if you’ve terminated the box. So, to me, that seems like a pretty good deal, especially since Amazon makes it so easy for you to build private AMIs, why not just image your perfect system, back up your data on your (included) S3 share, and just bring it back up in minutes if you need to?

Seems like a winner to me.

This is definitely an interesting paradigm shift from hosting as I know it, I am definitely still in the sandbox phase with this stuff, but its definitely an interesting concept, who knows where it could take me and my company. If we decided cloud computing was the way for our staging environment, we’d see a saving of close to $1500 a year for just that server, thats some serious savings in my mind! Or what if we built our fully optimized server instance, made a private AMI of it, and were suddenly able to roll out 20 application servers in literally 10 minutes? That is truly amazing to me. Looking forward to seeing where this kind of technology goes.