We moved to Boulder and….

Let’s face it, people: Boulder is a pretty awesome place.  I knew that before I moved here — to be honest I knew that before I had ever even been here.  But I was still blown away when I got here to see what a welcoming community this is.

For months after moving to Boulder, I kept meeting people who also just moved to Boulder.  People starting companies; people speaking at Ignite; people creating works of art on the chalk board at Atlas Purveyors; people speaking at local developer and business meetups.  It’s a town where if you have the right mindset, you’ll just fall right into place.

So when I was asked to come up with an idea for a Boulder Startup Week event, it wasn’t too difficult

So!

On Friday, May 20th from 5-7p at InspiringApps, some of Boulder’s most recent freshman class (with some sophomores and juniors thrown in for good measure) will gather to share their stories:

  • Why they moved here
  • Where they came from
  • How quickly they got plugged in
  • How awesome the ride has been
  • What they’re up to now

If you’re attending BSW from afar, check out this event.  Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you have.

If you’re in your first year or two here in Boulder, want to wear a fancy a name tag, and don’t mind sharing your story, get at me over email or twitter.

HOWTO: Spend your investors’ money

Mint’s pre-launch preso: 3 examples of ‘bottom line on top’ violations

Mint.com Pre-Launch Pitch Deck

This is a great, data-packed preso, but there are several slides that violate the ‘bottom line on top’ advice that the Startup Swami, Matt Douglas, has given me on numerous occasions.  Check out slides on 4, 6, 7 & 9.  The most important thing on the slide — the meat — is buried in the slide (most of the time at the bottom), and in a smaller font.

You should be hammering one-liners like those home in any kind of presentation; front and center, right on top.

An open letter to recruiters from developers

I get InMail, tweets, and direct emails all the time from recruiters.  I think I make it pretty clear that I’m not interested in finding a new job right now, but the emails come anyway.  They almost always have the same format:

[generic greeting].  I came across your (twitter profile|profile on LinkedIn|blog).  My organization [generic recruitment firm name] has a [arbitrary list of ‘excitement’ related adjectives] position in Ruby/Rails that I think you’d be perfect for [even though there’s a very good chance I don’t have a clue what your skill set is even after reading your resume/profile because I don’t have a technical background].  If you are interested, please get back to me and I will send you [the job description that for some inane reason I didn’t include in the first place].  If you are not, perhaps there is someone in your network who would be interested.

[generic sign off / apology for wasting time]

* rolls eyes *

Here’s my open letter response to all recruiters:

Dear Recruiters,

Us developers have been getting pretty tired of the “you might not be interested, but maybe you know someone who is” line.  ALL of you recruiters use this line.  I understand you probably think that you are  ”networking”, but it really just seems like you’re trying to get us to do your job.  What ends up happening is that us developers all get together in a bar, have a few beers, and talk about how incompetent tech recruiters are.  Lord help you if you happen to reach out generically with the SAME email on the SAME day to 3 or 4 developers who are friends.  It’s probably not the case that you are incompetent, but it’s definitely a place where we lose some respect for you.

So, cool it.  If you have a good idea, go find people that are actually looking for a job and write them a personalized email telling them about it.  If you’re new and not technical, admit it.  Tell us “hey man I have this Ruby/Rails gig and I saw those keywords on your profile.  It might not be a perfect fit, but would you ever want to chat about it?  I’m trying to learn more about this space.”
Most developers (that I know anyway) react better to requests for help than generic sales pitches.
Be honest.  Be personalized.  Be respectful.  Everybody wins.
$0.02
Love,Developers

EDIT: Shame on me.  The recruiter who reminded me to finally publish this draft responded to me directly about this blog post.  He informed me (very respectfully) that I had not removed ‘looking for new ventures’ or ‘looking for career opportunities’ from my LinkedIn profile.  So apparently I was wrong; I had not made it clear to recruiters that I’m not looking for work.  The rest of the rant stands anyway, though. :)  Happy New Year!

The Day I un-quit my job at Punchbowl.com

In my last video, I talk about the day I quit.  It never went through.  I ended up staying with them.  Here’s the story.

The Day I quit my job at Punchbowl

A quick tale of the day I quit my job at Punchbowl.com

Edit: Tumblr or Vimeo is having issues embedding this on iPhones/iPads I think.  You can try this direct link if it’s not working: http://www.vimeo.com/15445920

The Day Series: The Day I stopped writing The Day Series

The view from my new place

I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since my last post on this blog. Seems I have some ‘splaining to do.

To make a long (two month) story short, a lot has gone on in my life recently. In the past 2 months I have:

  • Quit my job
  • Driven across the country in a UHaul w/ my car in tow
  • Broken up…

Going from Web Services to Party Planning

A few months ago, MyPunchbowl launched what we’ve been calling the Vendor Portal.  If you go to www.punchbowl.com/vendors, you can search for vendors by category or keyword in a specific location.  In Rails-speak, www.mypunchbowl.com/vendors is part of the monolithic MyPunchbowl.com application.  We have a namespaced controller that deals with the requests, layouts and views for the main, state, city, state category, city category, and search results pages.  But none of the vendor data exists in the MyPunchbowl.com database.  We have another Rails app, creatively referred to as “The Vendors App”, that exposes a RESTful API around the several resources:

  • Cities
  • States
  • Vendors
  • Categories

We’ve extend the standard REST actions to include search on each of those resources, and that’s where all the magic happens.  Whatever a user types in for a search gets passed to the Vendors REST controller.  Some basic parameter filtering goes on in the controller, which then hands off to a wrapper that sits on top of ThinkingSphinx for full-text geosearching.  

Next, we launched http://vendors.punchbowl.com, which provides a way for vendors to add their business to our database.  The app is fairly straightforward:

  • Some CRUD for adding a profile, a photo, selecting some themes
  • A payment gateway so that vendors can buy better search ranking, photo galleries, hide ads on their listing page, etc…
  • An admin where entries can be reviewed be our Vendor Quality team

I’ve had my share of nerdstorms on this project:

  • Hacking up ThinkingSphinx because GoogleBot decided to start getting page 492 of search results when there were only 8 pages of search results, which TS did not particularly appreciate
  • Playing with MongoDB’s mapreduce to allow us to give real time information on how many users are searching for a particular vendor category in a particular location
  • Moving from an XML API to a JSON one when I realized that JSON was oodles more efficient (on both the generation and parsing ends)
  • Improving caching mechanisms on the MyPunchbowl.com side of things to reduce the load on our Vendors API application

And so on….

But it’s cool to pop up from the technology trenches every now and then and actually take a look at what we’re doing.  And what we’re doing is allowing people do this:

http://www.punchbowl.com/vendors/nm-new-mexico/taos/2401264/fun-peak

http://www.punchbowl.com/vendors/ma-massachusetts/lexington/2176091/sweet-beads—-birthday-parties-at-home

http://www.punchbowl.com/vendors/me-maine/bangor/2504232/dana-lavertu-dj-entertainment

http://www.punchbowl.com/vendors/il-illinois/maple-park/1494610/wild-orchid-custom-floral-design

http://www.punchbowl.com/vendors/al-alabama/birmingham/2360520/amerson-events-dj-service

And that’s pretty damn cool if you ask me.  Yes, we have a long way to go.  But seeing how many vendors are actually using this system to get in touch with people planning parties is awesome.  Seeing how much effort they put into their listings and how creative they can be is exciting.  I’m really proud of what we’ve done with the Vendor system at MyPunchbowl.  And I’m looking forward to see where it goes from here.

Take a look around at what you’re doing.  Have you popped up lately to see how users are using what you are building?  It can be really motivating.  If you have any cool stories for stuff that users are doing with your applications, share them in the comments.  I’d love to see it.

The Day Series: The Day we turned down TechCrunch for DEMO

When Scot and I left our jobs to start MessageSling, we didn’t know we were going to start MessageSling. We didn’t have the name. We didn’t even have the idea. We just knew we wanted to be in this sweet spot:

It’s pretty funny admitting it, but when we left our jobs, we had a better idea of…

I’m speaking at MongoSF

I’m wicked excited to announce that I’m flying out to San Francisco at the end of the month to speak at MongoSF.  The conference is a single day, multi-track conference that’s going to run the gammit: programming workshops, MongoDB internal discussions, the current state of the OSS ecosystem around MongoDB, and (the reason I’m going) several presentations on examples of production deployments.

To be honest, when I saw the rest of the people presenting at this conference I gulped a little bit.  There are some giants presenting, and I’m psyched to hear about all the cool stuff that is going on at the cutting edge.

What I’m also psyched about is the wide range of production deployment talks.  On the “this is how you use MongoDB like a Big Dog” end of things there is a talk I am very excited to hear by David Mytton, founder of Boxed Ice, entitled Humongous Data at Server Density: Approaching 1 Billion Documents in MongoDB which I’m sure will be a blast.

And at the other end: my talk :-)

Back in October, we made the decision at Punchbowl to use MongoDB alongside MySQL as part of a non-mission-critical new application we were building (since then it has become mission-critical).  I’ll be discussing the decision process to use MongoDB, implementation details of how we got up and running, unexpected issues we ran into, and how they were resolved.  I’ll also give some insight into how I feel the entire process has benefitted our engineering team and our company’s bottom line.

And because I’m opinionated, I might also throw in 5 minutes of “IMHO” with regards to some of the NoSQL vs. SQL “debate” that has been brewing in the blogosphere over the past six months.

There are two audiences I’ll be addressing in my talk.  First and foremost, I’ll be speaking to developers who have never used MongoDB.  Developers that think MongoDB looks cool from all the blog posts they’ve read, but are hesitant about “going through all the trouble.”

Second, I’ll be dropping in a few nuggets aimed at the business guys & gals: engineering managers, founders, CEOs, etc….  The people who guard their developer man-hours like hawks and who have even more hesitation, but without any of the romantic feelings about “how cool MongoDB sounds”.  I’ll try to assuage your anxieties and show you that, in the end, giving developers the chance to experiment with this stuff will pay dividends down the road.

So sign up for MongoSF today if you haven’t already.  I’m excited to see you there.