Category: TechBiz

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TechBiz

Reflections on the Last Recession: 2002-2005

I remember the last recession clearly. I arrived back home after living in Italy to cheap rents and a San Francisco that felt very empty. I found a huge room in Cole Valley with a hot tub and garden for $600 a month. I thought that was expensive at the time in the Winter of 2002.

Here’s the run down:

  • 2002 – I spent this year re-adjusting to being back in San Francisco. I felt alienated. When I arrived to Italy, the first person to greet me was a beautiful woman who said, “Good Evening, can I help you? Are you lost?” When I came back to the good ol’ US of A, and greeted the first person I saw, her response was a rude, “Who are you? Do I know you?”
  • 2003 – I cashed out a good chunk of my savings. I spent a year learning ancient Greek and studying philosophy. What I got out of that study was how beautiful and enough philosophy is, and that at the same time the world is so indifferent to such beauty. I really wanted to be some gal’s boyfriend at this time because I could use a good portion of my free time to help her out. I hit a low point employment-wise when I was stacking candles at Planet Weavers. When the money ran out, I barely had enough to eat. However, thanks to a few good people, I started getting odds and ends tech jobs. The best thing is that I found out my natural work and sleep schedule. My body likes to work at 9am and sleep at 1am.
  • 2004 – I started to see more and more tech jobs. I began to see the blossoming of a social life I never thought possible. I went out on a lot of dates this year, and I’m still friends with the women I’ve dated from this time.
  • 2005 – I really feel that this year was the worst and the best. I really believed in the whole Web 2.0 thing, but I found that caused a lot of conflict with some of the folks I was working with. I learned that if you’re gonna go cutting edge, it’s gonna shake your world. I lost a lot of old friends because of Web 2.0 ambitions, but I gained a few new ones. It was worth it.

Although I had the chance to take a full-time job in 2003, I stayed lean and focused on learning Web 2.0 technology until I could work for the Web 2.0 site that I wanted to in 2006.

It’s strange looking back on those times. I know I’ve changed a lot, but *some* of the very people who have helped me have not. I have tried to help these in whatever way I can, but they all just seem stuck. Then there are others who have helped me and I have helped and they’re not stuck. They’re thriving. Will they continue to thrive?

Take aways: Use an economic down-turn as an opportunity to find out who you really are. I’ve worked with so many people who were just in it for the money and not real geeks at heart. Steer clear of these people, because they are toxic from getting involved with the wrong technologies for the wrong reasons.

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TechBiz

Who Is An Inspiring CEO?

Who is an inspiring CEO?

For my next job, I want to work for an inspiring CEO. Not someone who gets whispered about in the industry as being “weird,” or a “control freak.” Not someone that puts doubt into people. I hate getting asked questions that sound more like accusations, “You work(ed) for him/her?” I’ve always defended my CEOs record.

Here’s what I mean by inspiring:
1) Says the right things that motivate people in the company.
2) Recognizes when people would gladly sacrifice for the company and acknowledges it. I’m talking about an honor based company.
3) Welcomes convivial debate.
4) Leads by doing.
5) Would probably find a solution to the Kobayashi Maru test.

If you know of an inspiring CEO, I would love to hear about it.

Categories
TechBiz Webalytics WebApps

How To Save Money with Memcache

Jeremiah Owyang twittered, “I’m asking every CEO I meet about their take on the economic downturn.” This is great advice, but I’ve got my own reasons for thinking so, and would like to invite Jeremiah to share his reasons here.

For me, I’ve been talking to different CEOs and telling them the importance of scalable technologies like memcache to save money NOW. I ask CEOs about the economy to hear their concerns and to see for my own business reasons if they’ve implemented memcache on their servers.

The math is really simple. Most social network sites can waste anywhere from 5000 to 10000 seconds per week on slow, un-cached database queries. Assuming the ability to handle around 30 requests per second, many large websites miss out on an additional 150000 to 300000 page views per week. Not to mention that you lose a user for every 30 seconds of wait.

If a busy site with stats above implemented memcache they would have:

  • not lost between 165 and 335 users per week.
  • 150000 to 300000 more page views per week
  • $500 – $1000 more per week on a 100 x 720 skyscraper with the right ctr and ecpm — that’s an additional coder

If you want to see the above savings, feel free to contact me at barce[a t no spam]codebelay.com .

Categories
TechBiz

Jason Calacanis Wants Startups to do 10 Things NOW

Jason Calacanis Lists 10 things startups need to do now given the economic climate.

Since I can’t reprint, here are my comments on his points 1 through 10.

1. Barce’s comment: That goes without saying. I’d like to see another option besides this one. I think it’s this. You’ve got your health and you’ve got your sanity. Be happy with that and let others enjoy your happiness. It’s a scarce commodity in difficult times.

2. Barce’s Comment: I couldn’t agree more. Teach your team how to use the latest collaborative technologies. Make notes of who is technology shy with the new communication tools. At Dogster one of the last things I tried to introduce was the use of IRC, a tried and true communication tool for avoiding inefficient back and forths with IM.

3. Barce’s Comment: Make sure you are firing the “average people.” Work at startups can often be blurred by politics. Very often, the one who speaks the least is the one who does the most work. It’s better to keep someone who disagrees with you than a yes person who will lead you blithely to the end of your business.

4. Barce’s comment: Also be sure to adjust your terms from net 60 to net 90… the extra 30 days can help with your accounts payable.

5. Barce’s comment: This is pretty tough to execute so have an all hands and ask for ideas.

6. Barce’s comment: This means that every worker of yours is a marketer who must do there best to market your company. If you’re at a social media site, that means talking face to face with at least 5 new people a day about your website. That’s not asking much: 2 at the coffee shop in the morning, 2 at lunch, and 1 at your afterwork hangout or the bus stop in the evening.

7. Barce’s comment: What a great way to build morale in down economic times! This is pretty fun, and again take note of who isn’t having fun with this.

8. Barce’s comment: I always shown up for stuff like this, and it’s a great team builder.

9. Barce’s comment: This can be as simple as a google ad that gets served up on your competitor’s site because they are on life support and can’t watch all the ads anymore.

10. Barce’s comment: My dream is to have a popular website that I’ve created and that people just love to be on. I want to learn more about raising money. If you’ve got tips, I’m all ears.

Happy Friday!

Categories
TechBiz

What Projects Are In The Works

  1. I wrote Noobwatcher.com as an emergency response to a misguided development process and as a solution for when the sysadmin won’t let you configure subversion the way the dev team and the company as a whole needs it.
  2. I wrote the number one Google entry for installing the sfGuardPlugin as of this writing, and wow, they still weren’t happy with my work.
  3. I worked closely with symfony developers to figure out some complicated undocumented symfony issues such as formatting errors in forms. Thanks, Dustin!
Categories
How-To TechBiz

Beware the Recruiter Bait and Switch: Get References!

There’s a slimy bait and switch tactic that’s been pretty common this year, and it’s the recruiter bait and switch. They send you a letter that looks like this:

Dear Victim,

Nice to find you on linkedin. I'm contacting you as your work experience looks
like a good fit for roles at AwesomeCompany.com .

Cheers, Slimy Recruiter

Then they tell you that the job that they were originally trying to fill is gone, but they have other jobs available at SlaveLabor.com.

The sad thing is that if you dig around, you find out that these recruiters never had a relationship with AwesomeCompany.com and are really just working for SlaveLabor.com .

Takeaway: Get references from your recruiter of people that have placed.

Categories
TechBiz WebApps

How Do You Avoid Presentation Disaster?

It’s been a rough few days at work. We got hacked. I had to cancel a lunch with some pals at the Reverie. @alicetiara and @walnotes were gonna be there and everything was set for a pretty convivial conversation and some fun debate.

But the code used for my presentation didn’t work because the machine it was working on wasn’t configured correctly. There might have been an issue with someone overwriting my code, too.

How do you avoid presentation disaster?

For my part, I’m creating a tool called Noobwatcher that:

  • checks the repo for changes every N seconds — because of a high noobage level, I’m gonna check every second
  • the moment that there is an update send the diff to me via IM, email, twitter. Take your pick.
  • check the server configuration files important to my code every N seconds
  • the moment a configuration file changes send the diff to me via IM, email, twitter — might as well use pownce, too.

Have you had to set something like this up? If so, what solution did you use?

Categories
TechBiz

How Will the World’s Financial Crisis Affect Web 2.0?

During the last tech down turn, I was unemployed for about a year and ate into most of my savings. The first job I was able to get was stacking candles at a store for minimum wage. I had a lot of trouble making ends meet, and often spent nights worrying if I would make rent. I swore to myself that I’d never be in such bad shape again.

In 2003, my poverty was something I’d like to believe I chose, and romanticized, perhaps because it wasn’t hardcore poverty. I knew others who fared worse, who never enjoyed the first dot-com gravy train, or who had bought homes in 1999 thinking that they’d always make $80,000 a year as a secretary. I made half that as a coder in 1999 because I didn’t believe it was right to make that much. Now, I’ve tossed that idealism aside and really am out there to make as much as I can get.

It’s 2008, and I see that the douche bags of Wall Street through their greed have managed to get my attention in the form of a world financial crisis. I see that most Americans by not saving have also created a mole hill out of things. I see that we cannot believe in an economic system of rational agents because now we are not.

The big take away is to save, save, save.

Just like in Fight Club, the things you’ve owned are now owning you.

The big question: How Will the World’s Financial Crisis Affect Web 2.0?

In what structured ways will the world around us crumble?

Categories
TechBiz

16 Years of Telnet Access to The WELL Ends on 9/24

When I logged onto the WELL via SSH today, I got the following message of the day:

   You own your own words. This means that you are responsible for
   the words that you post on The WELL and that reproduction of those
   words without your permission in any medium outside of The WELL's
   conferencing system may be challenged by you, the author.

   ******************************************************************

      Support is in the wellcome conference, at (415) 645-9300,
      at http://www.well.com/help or by mail at helpdesk@well.com 

   ******************************************************************

   Access change:  Effective Wednesday Sep 24, we will start blocking 
   telnet access to well.com, and will require that all shell users 
   connect to well.com via an SSH client instead of a telnet client.  
   If you're still using telnet for Unix and Picospan sessions, see 
   news.3126.1638 for details on updating your security.

I applaud the security change that is coming to the WELL, but it is also a sign that the Internet will never be a safe place.

Categories
TechBiz WebApps

Stack Overflow Answers Your Hardest Tech Questions

From Jeff Atwood, the blogger who gives you Coding Horror, your hardest tech questions get answered at Stack Overflow. I wanted to see if somebody had coded a way to edit text fields in Vim, and bam, there was the answer.

picture of stack overflow
The idea behind Stack Overflow is that the collective wisdom of technologists will always be better than the experts.

So far it has surpassed my expectations on the quality, obscurity, and speed at which tech questions get answered.

Will entropy, otherwise known as spam, kill this site? Or is its reputation system good enough to prevent that?

Has anybody stumped Stack Overflow yet?

As always, your comments are very welcome.