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OSCON Day 2: Launching a Startup in 3 Hours
Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).
The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also talk of legal issues, how (basically) to think about forming the company with the people involved, and decisions that need to be made at a business level aside from just the coding.
The second half of the talk wasn’t a talk at all. Instead, people who had ideas stood up, presented their idea in a couple of sentences, and once the ideas were out there, we were told to break into groups and get to work! So people would get up and move over to the person whose idea they liked, and they’d start brainstorming. I decided to head out after about 30 minutes of observing and talking with people about ideas, but when I left, there were probably 6-8 groups of people engrossed in conversations, and the energy level was very high. Overall, it was a really exciting experience!
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.protocolostomy.com%2F2008%2F07%2F22%2Foscon-day-2-launching-a-startup-in-3-hours%2F'; addthis_title = 'OSCON+Day+2%3A+Launching+a+Startup+in+3+Hours'; addthis_pub = 'jonesy';OSCON Evening 1 Begins, and More Portland Tips
The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.
It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very friendly. 
A couple of us were in a rush to get back by 7 for the BoF sessions, and when we asked the waittress how easy it was to catch a cab, she immediately informed us that she would have the hostess call one for us. About 2 minutes later we were in a cab on our way back (we wouldn’t have made it back in time if we had to walk back to catch the light rail).
I was not one of those rushing to a BoF, so I did a little poking around the area near the convention center. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to stray too far, but I did find a couple of points of interest. First, there’s a bank right across the street from the convention center. I’d be willing to bet that the ATM there is less than the $3 the ATM inside the center charges.
Beyond that is a paintball place. It was closed by the time I found it, and I don’t know if 
Tonight appears to be low-key from what I can tell. There’s currently no chatter on irc, the hotel bar had a few people chatting, and I might go down to catch the rush of people as they return from dinner and BoF sessions. Stay tuned tomorrow for more!
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.protocolostomy.com%2F2008%2F07%2F21%2Foscon-evening-1-begins-and-more-portland-tips%2F'; addthis_title = 'OSCON+Evening+1+Begins%2C+and+More+Portland+Tips'; addthis_pub = 'jonesy';OSCON Day 1 Comes to a Close
I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going on, as smaller groups take to discussing things over dinner and a beer or three.
I have to say, that I occasionally pop into irc channels for conferences I’m not even at and follow up on that because I’m involved a bit in conference planning as part of my work with Python Magazine (I’m helping to organize the PyWorks conference in November). This conference seems to have a pretty happy audience, if IRC chatter is any indication (and it usually is). Sure, there are a couple of weak spots in the wireless network, there are some fuzzy projectors, and there was a little confusion regarding breakfast this morning, but the important bits have been well-covered by the OSCON organizers and the “boots on the ground” here on site. Kudos to them all.
This afternoon I hopped to a couple of different talks: one on Memcached and MySQL, and the other on A/B testing. Both contained good content. Of course, I’m a systems guy primarily, so I sort of wanted more of an overview of memcached from the point of view of an admin who is deploying it rather than a developer implementing their code around it. I still got plenty of value out of that talk, and this *is* really more of an open source *developer’s* conference, so the expectations of 99% of the people in the room were met, I’m sure.
A/B testing is just not an exciting topic, and I would imagine that peoples’ bosses made them go to that talk whether they liked it or not. Not to say the talk wasn’t good - the parts I saw (I came in after the break) were good, and I learned from it, and that was the goal. If you’re a QA/QC person, I’m sure the talk was riveting, and there were a lot of good ideas and things I’d never considered flying by in the slides.
Overall, Day 1 is a win. I’ll cover more about this evening’s events in the pre-breakfast hours tomorrow. Stay tuned!
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Rails 2.1 introduces three annoying bugs. Let's fix them.Cloud computing hype overload
I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational Exuberance”.
When Alan Greenspan used those words to describe the attitudes of investors toward the markets, what he was basically saying was that there were people who didn’t really know what they were doing, putting more money than they ought, into things they knew relatively little about. Further, he was saying that the decisions people were making with regards to where to put their money were a) bad, or at least b) not based on sound reasoning, or the ‘facts on the ground’.
This, I think, is where we are at with “cloud computing”. The blog post that put me over the edge is this one, for the record. I read Sean’s writings often enough, but this one strikes me as being a little off, a little sensationalistic, not based in reality, and a little misleading.
Maybe he just didn’t put enough qualifiers in there. His post might make more sense if he limited its scope and provided more facts, but I guess it’s just an opinion piece so he decided not to go that route, and that’s his prerogative I guess.
By limiting the scope, I mean he should’ve realized that there are millions of web sites currently scaling quite nicely without the use of cloud computing. In addition, some of the new ones that are having issues are also not using cloud computing, and when they hit bumps in the road, they make it through, and the great thing is that they also share their stories, and those stories indicate that a cloud (or, the current cloud offerings) wouldn’t have helped much (there’s lots of other evidence of that too). What would’ve helped is if they had paid more attention to:
- monitoring
- initial infrastructure design
- their own app code and app design
Handling a huge amount of fulltext searches
How do you handle a massive number of fulltext searches? MySQL? Been there, done that. It’s a no-go for average servers. PostgreSql with Tsearch2?
See a nice solution cooked from ruby, thin, memcached and sphinx.Plug-ins: isn?t there a better way?
If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.
What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be supported in future versions of the software.
Two examples that touch my daily life are Firefox, and Wordpress.
Lately (since around March) I’ve been having lots of trouble with Firefox. I thought upgrading to Firefox 3 would’ve helped, but it really didn’t. Running it on OS X, Firefox hangs frequently enough that I’m actually considering using Safari (I do NOT like Safari). Know what happened right around that time? Ah - I found the firefox plugins for managing EC2 and S3. So today I’ll uninstall those and see if it helps.
With Wordpress, there are two things I’m missing: I need to let readers subscribe to comments via email, and I need better Google AdSense for Search integration with WordPress. Both things are kinda maybe supported in one version or another “but should work under…” - whatever. I don’t really want to spend my time downloading, reading the documentation to do the install, doing the install and configuration, etc., and then finding out that it doesn’t work, or worse, having it look on the surface like it works, but then finding later that it fails in evil-but-silent ways.
These two products are by no means exceptions. Moodle, PHP-Nuke, XOOPS, MediaWiki, Twiki, Postnuke… and for that matter, OpenLDAP, BIND, SSH, MySQL, Sendmail, PAM… all have plugins available written by other folks, and all have bitten me at one point or another. Usually when it comes time to upgrade the base software.
I’m not saying anything new here. People have had this problem with lots of different software products for a long time. My question is “why is this still a problem?” I’m not asking this because I have some magical obvious solution or answer, I’m asking because I feel like there’s probably more to it than I’m grasping. I’m not a masterful developer, or even a masterful software project manager, so I’m calling on all of you who are (or are closer than I am) to help me understand the problem. Some day, I might find myself in a position to take the wrong or right path where plug-ins are concerned, and I’d like to be more informed than I am so I can avoid putting users in the position I find myself in when I use other peoples’ software. Has Joel blogged this yet? If so, I can’t find it. Links please?
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Ruby on Rails 2.1.x Scaffolding
Ruby on Rails 2.0 changes the way Rails uses scaffolding. To understand scaffolding with RoR 2.0 go through this tutorial.
If you like this then please share it with others.
ThanksStrokeDB
StrokeDB
StrokeDB
Just Say No to Manual CRUD
I’ve been working a lot with Castle’s Active Record and Ruby on Rails in the last month and as a result have written significantly fewer basic CRUD operations and database access code. It’s been an addictive experience and has caused me to rethink the proper role of hand-written database code (sprocs) within an application.The Even Bigger News About Maglev
Maglev is a new Gemstone Smalltalk based VM for Ruby project. Ruby + Smalltalk + Gemstone is your secret nuclear development weapon.MagLev @ RailsConf - report from the highlhy anticipated talk about Ruby on the Gemstone VM
At RailsConf on Friday, Avi Bryant and Bob Walker of GemStone revealed plans for the MagLev project. MagLev will run Ruby on Rails within GemStone's distributed object technology. The MagLev VM, although only partially implemented, so far outperforms MRI 1.8.Redmine
Connecting to MySQL using SSL encryption in Ruby on Rails
If you're connecting to your database from remote clients, then it's high time you started encrypting! Otherwise, you have only yourself to blame if your data gets intercepted.Databases Make Bad Routers ...
Reports are circulating that Twitter is already dropping Ruby on Rails, and folks are getting worked up in all sorts of directions. Let's calm down ... this is just a case of asking a tool to act like something it simply is not.Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases
We’ve run against multiple (five now) separate PostgreSQL servers for a long time now. To be clear, that’s five separate “databases” in the sense that PostgreSQL uses the term. Not a replicating / mirror setup - separate databases with different data but with similar structure.