Thanks to the fellows over at Rails Envy for doing a quick spot on my SmartMonth plugin! I actually had never heard of Chronic until they had mentioned it. I could see how this would actually go very well with a gem like that!

Speaking of SmartMonth, I have a couple of cool optimizations I plan to make in the new week, so stay tuned if you are interested!

10 points for most original title, ever.

Lately, my company and I have been looking into the benefits of switching to Git for source code repository management. Its currently the new “hotness” of the hacker world, and with some of the claims that I’ve read, its pretty hard to ignore.

Linus Torvalds has made a few references to how much he hates tools like Subversion and CVS, and he has a lot of interesting reasons for feeling the way he does. I don’t agree with everything, but then again, I am not writing a kernel. Subversion has worked great for me and my team in the past, but we are definitely starting to envy some of the Git advantages.

Its indisputable that Git makes it unbelievably easy to branch and tag your repositories, hands down. The bigger and more integrated my codebase and team is getting, the more of crucial of a feature that is to us. Decentralization is not a big deal to me. Frankly, I never am really “off the grid”, so most times I just do git commit followed by a push.

Fortunately for us, Unfuddle supports Git now, so its easy for us to use our existing project management tool with this new technology, at no extra investment! But, I have to take a moment to say, GitHub is definitely pretty killer. Unfuddle’s support for Git is new and will improve over time, but I am very very impressed with how well GitHub has nailed the integration. The biggest reason for me to move (some) of my code to GitHub is for the public aspect of it. From this point forward, I will be posting my company and I’s open source contributions there. Mostly because Unfuddle doesn’t provide external access to projects in the same way, which is actually sort of strange in my opinion.

Maybe in the future I will be so inclined to product an Unfuddle-Git bridge to keep my repositories (edit: there is one already, why isn’t this a part of GitHub yet?!) synchronized, for projects I plan to open source. Overall, I am pretty happy with Git, I think my initial impressions of it were tainted by the “growing pains” I experienced while trying to get it to work with Unfuddle. Seriously, with GitHub I was up and running with the repo in under 2 minutes!

You can check out my repositories here. There is one project there now that I haven’t talked about too much yet, mostly because I just built and released it in the last 72 hours. More on that soon!

Recently I attended the first ever Start Conference here in San Francisco, CA. The last segment of the day they did was a “Pitch Off”, which I thought was absolutely fantastic! Imagine American Idol + Startup Nerds + Hilarity, it was pretty much like that. I saw some really great presentations and some really bad presentations, but learned a ton from all of the above.

There was one startup in particular that really stood out to me as a product that is truly pushing the envelope, especially in a world of facebook++ mentaility when it comes to consumer internet products. That product was Apture. Apture is all about creating rich and interactive media linking. At first, I was like “wtf is that”, but their expertly-crafted powerpoint skillz made it very clear.

In essence, its a tool that allows you to make your links in your blog far more interesting, what do I mean by that? Well, since I have recently enabled my blog to use apture, via the wonderful wordpress plugin they provide after their 3 second sign up, let me show you. :)

It has all sorts of integrations with places and things that people use most often on the web, so for instance, if I were to tell you I live in Albany, CA, I could provide a simple little map right here on my page (click the link to see what I mean). Now, when you click on that link, you’ll notice a Google Map appears, I’ve also annotated that link with another link to a wikipedia article of my favourite local pizza place!

Cool or what? Now check this out.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love The Mars Volta and Radiohead, they are definitely my two favourite bands. Now, if you click on both of the band names, you can see the cool sorts of things that Apture does for you, with very little effort at all!

Really the only downside to this product is the centralization aspect, if their servers go down, so do my links :(

I am able to create these links on the fly, and make them as inter-connected as I choose! Apture is definitely one of the coolest web tools I’ve seen in a while and I encorage my fellow bloggers to try it out for themselves!

Yesterday I attended the first ever Start Conference, in San Francisco, CA. That conference was amazing, I will without a doubt be attending next year. I learned so much about the core of starting a business in ways that I found truly invaluable. It was a fantastic conference with a fantastic vibe, I highly recommend it to anyone who is in a startup, starting a new company, or just interested in the entrepreneur world.

If you’ve been following my blog, and talking to me with any regularity, it is no suprise I quit the day job and started my own company almost 10 months ago now (wow). I am happy to report I am still standing, for the most part. It has been an absolute challenge in so many ways, and every single thing I’ve learned along the way have been important to put me on the road that I am heading towards now, at quite a rapid pace.

I’ve gone into business with my brother, and although we see eye to eye on many things, at times, we disagree, which I think is healthy. One of the things I heard somebody mention during the conference is “never go into business with family”. I have always wondered in the back of my head, did I do the right thing? After this past week, I really feel like I have. The reason why it works so well for me is knowing that no matter what sorts of fights and challenges we are faced with, at the end of the day we are still brothers, and we have a common, builtin respect and love for each other, which is not something every founder can say about their co-founder.

Its hard to imagine that we’ve been doing this for the last 10 months. We’ve seen growth, albeit modest, but still, growth nonetheless. We’ve been working with a close friend of mine in defining the first product my company will release by the end of the year, and we are all very very excited that its almost worth hearing about.

I’ve never believed in that whole “stealth mode” startup bullshit. In most cases, I’ve never made anyone sign an NDA to find out what I’m up to, quite the contrary. I am excited to tell people what we are doing, because I love to see what they think about it, ask them from their prospective, its very eye opening! The reason I don’t say a lot about what I am doing, even at this very moment, is because we are still forming the concept to be “widely consumable”. Until today, we didn’t even have a true name for the product, just a codename!

What I can say is, its not directly related to the consumer internet. No, I am not building the next Twitter, I am not building the next Facebook, and I am not changing the way people work with spreadsheets. I am doing something to help a market of people who, I feel, have been ignored in the rebirth of internet technologies.

Its a modest goal, I want to help people by giving them what they are asking for…its the true entrepreneurial spirit. Hopefully, in a couple more weeks, I will actually have a cohesive “pitch” thats worth telling people about, I am looking forward to that, very soon.

I am hooked on the religion that is known as GTD (Getting Things Done), and I have also become rather dependent on an application that follows the whole GTD way of, well, getting things done, known as Things. Its a fantastic application! But unfortunately, its not a finished work of art, just yet.

I’ve never played with OmniFocus before, and some people will call blasphemy right about now, but hear me out. The attraction to Things is its simplicity. It doesn’t get in your way with its opinion of how you should manage yourself, it just lets you tell it what you need to do, and its up to you to get crazy with it.

I love that! A tool that simply does what I want to do, the way I want to do it! CulturedCode, the company behind Things, has also released a fantastic Things iPhone app that brings the love on the road with you, awesome! It can’t sync with the desktop YET. Sync capabilities are coming within the next week, and I am very excited about that.

But I didn’t write this post to basically tell you why Things is so great, actually, quite the contrary. I think there are some big gaps in quality in Things, and I am hoping that CulturedCode hears me and maybe takes my thoughts into consideration. Maybe. :)

So, shall we begin?

Web Service Integration
What do I mean exactly? Look at a tool like Evernote. Seamless integration, your information is constantly synchronized. Not with ad-hoc wireless hacks, not with iPhone tethering, not with MobileMe, through good ol’ internets. Why would this be cool?

• Other applications could have access to your tasks! Think Basecamp or Highrise, How cool would it be if a third-party could synchronize too! Not just your Thing-suite.
• Centralized backup! If my computer tanks, or my iPhone is stolen, the data is off my hard drive and in the clouds. Speaking of clouds, how much could it possibly cost to support the userbase with S3? If all the data really is XML, how much space could each user take up, exponentially?
• Alternate, Service-based Revenue Stream! I’d GLADLY pay $10 a month to have this capability. No question, I wouldn’t even think twice about it, and I am sure I am not the only one who thinks that.

iPhone App: Include Proximity Capabilities
I have to say, this is a really neat feature of the OmniFocus iPhone app. It gives you your contexts based on how close you are around them, if you define a proximity (via address or something). I would love that!

iPhone App: Voice Notes
Sometimes the last thing I want to do is type on my little screen, I just want to take my “open loop” out of my head and make it go elsewhere, quick and easy! I know, this kind of thing gets dangerous when I talk about web integration, suddenly you’ve got larger file overheads, but compression algorithms can make this not a big deal, per se.

More In-Depth Syncing
What I mean by that is, if I “schedule” a task in Things for a specific day, or even a due-date. It should create a Calendar entry for me in iCal that corresponds. Obviously it has a concrete date (and sometimes a time), that is easily translatable to a calendar event.

That is all that is coming to me right now, really the biggest thing in my mind is web service integration. That would be killer, on so many levels. I really think thats the missing peice to this whole system, in my eyes…its also missing from OmniFocus (I think?).

Either way, Things is definitely worth taking a look at if you are into GTD, and have a mac.

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!

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.

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!

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!

My birthday was Thursday, the 12th. My brother totally shocked me and bought me a drumset! Its a Gretsch Catalina Club set, which sounds absolutely awesome! I’ve never played a drumset that had such good tone. Its a simple 4 piece set (1 rack tom, 1 floor tom, bass drum, and a snare). I also got a decent set of Symbian cymbals (B8 series) which sound crisp and solid. The rest of the hardware came as a kit from PDP, it seemed pretty solid, and so far is holding up nicely.

This is definitely a fun kit, I am really excited because it seems our studio is basically completed now with the inclusion of this element! I am hoping this summer is going to be musical. It better be now! Now we’ve just got to figure out the best way to mic/record the set. Oh, and I should get a cowbell too :)

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