Matt Mazur

Excellent presentation given at the Le Web conference:

The actual title is “Employees Suck”, but I prefer the recommended “The Traditional Employment Model Sucks.” There’s also a video of it on ustream, but he was rushed for time and it’s not as good as just clicking through the presentation.

Domain Pigeon will aim to make slide 53′s “Hunt for Unique Names” objective a bit easier (hopefully).

Last night I had the pleasure of attending my first Philly on Rails pub night.

I found out about it a few weeks back after I asked on HackerNews whether anyone knew of any Philly based startup groups and someone pointed me to the Philly on Rails website.

About 20 people attended last night and I was told about a third to half were new. It was very laid back and I had a really good time. Just a bunch of guys (and one gal) sitting around drinking beer and talking about nerdy things.

From what I gathered only two of the people (Jordan and Joan) were startup oriented, but there may have been others. Several people worked for Comcast in one form or another, some worked at web development firms, a few worked at software companies, and a few, like me, had unrelated careers but dabbled in Rails during their free time.

I’m already looking forward to the next meeting.

Would I pick up the useless and destructive lenses left by millions of people both past and present or would I have the courage to look at the world, both outer and inner, with fresh eyes. To look at it as if I was the first person on earth…not be swayed by the masses that took into their souls what others deemed important in order to avoid the responsibility of independent action.

Marty

I took today and tomorrow off from work so that I can catch up on my work. When I moved positions at work my hours were increased by about an hour and a half per day. While that’s only a few hours a week, it’s a big cut into progamming/hacking time. On a given weekday I had three free hours of hacking and three to spend with my wife. With an hour and a half less, it’s mostly taken out of the hacking. A project that would have taken me four months turns into six or seven. I’d happily hack 12+ hours/day if I could, but… not yet.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from a short story my great uncle wrote. He’s almost 80 and is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.

Here’s a rough todo list…

- Domain Pigeon – I’m probably 80% of the way towards a launchable product. For some crazy, stupid reason whenever I wanted to test out a new design I would set out doing it with HTML/CSS instead of doing a mock up first. Fortunately I came to my sense… Yesterday I created an entirely new layout in Photoshop in about an hour. With that to work off of, I fixed up the page in no time. No more of this blind “it’ll probably turn out ok” nonsense. If you don’t know where you want to go you’re probably not going to get there, right?

- ALL IN Expert – Plan is to make this available for download w/some background later today.

- PhillyOnRails meetup tonight – will report back tomorrow.

- Oh, and the wife gave me about 18 things to do since I have all this free time now… geeze.

I spent the morning reading about and playing around with Git.

Git, like the Macbook, is a big leap in efficiency for me. In the past when I wanted to make experimental changes in my applications I would use a combination of commenting and Save As to test and revert as required. Additionally, my project directories are littered with compressed zip folders containing snapshots at different points in time.

Git changes all that. I’m not entirely fluent with it yet, but I’m getting there.

Here are three resources which I recommend to anyone wanting to learn.

A Tour of Git: The Basics

Gittutorial: Manual Page

Peeepcode: Git

I’d do it in this order too. I started off with the Peepcode tutorial, but he used some terminology that I wasn’t familiar with at first. After reading through the first two tutorials I was able to easily follow along with the screencast.

To get an MBA or not to get an MBA, that is the question.

I’ve been considering getting an MBA for some time. At one point several months ago I had made up my mind that I was going to get one. Fortunately, I came to my senses and now I’m 95% sure that I’m not going to.

I think it started with an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about earnings reports. I had come across (yet another) term I wasn’t familiar with. My thought process went something like this: “Diluted earnings per share… what the hell is that? I have no idea. It sounds important. I better get an MBA so I figure out what its talking about.”

I started doing some research and found several online schools that offered MBA programs that focused on entrepreneurship (attending a school isn’t practical at the moment). The descriptions sounded perfect for me — if you want to start and run a business, we’ll teach you what you need to know… yada yada yada. It would cost me about $18K and 20 months of time at about 15 hours/week to get it. The wife and I discussed it and decided that I should do it.

I decided to wait a week to make the final decision.

I didn’t sleep well that week. I’d lay awake calculating in my head how much free time I’d have to work on the technical half of it. It turned out I’d have to pretty much put learning Rails and web development on hold until I finished the MBA program. I tried figuring out ways around this — maybe I could work on it during my lunch breaks. Maybe I could get up early on the weekends to get a few hours in. Maybe…

It wasn’t going to happen and I knew it–there just wasn’t enough time in the day. I’d have to put my plans on hold in order to get the MBA. When I realized that I became very depressed. I’d go hack away, frustrated that I’d have to put it on hold in order to learn what the significance of diluted earnings per share was.

There were other considerations as well. The online schools that offered these specialized MBA programs were not exactly prestigious. In fact, the primary one I was considering was solely an online school — they did not have a campus anywhere. They were mentioned on a few online MBA related web sites, but other than that, it didn’t appear that anyone had heard of them. If I was confident that I would learn everything I needed to know from their courses then maybe — but I worried that the lack of information I could find on their programs reflected on its quality. There were some good schools that offered other types of online MBAs, such as international business, accounting, and the like, but they cost upwards of $30K and I didn’t want to learn that stuff anyway.

Then it hit me. This — hacking — is what I love doing. It’s what I’m passionate about. I was considering giving that up in order to learn some business theory and definitions, something that I could learn pretty well on my own anyway. It’s not like I could even network (since they’re online) or get a resume booster (since no one has heard of them).

Additionally, given the time and money it would cost me, pursing an MBA would probably have the opposite effect on my goals. Instead of working on something tangible and acquiring the technical skills and experience necessary to found a startup, I’d be bogged in textbooks learning a lot of things I’ll probably never use. In a strange, ironic way, I think that in five years I’d be more likely to work as some mid-level manager with an MBA than without one and that is exactly the opposite of where I want to be.

And so, MBA is postponed… probably indefinitely.

I wouldn’t mind getting a masters in computer science, but I’ll save that for another post…

P.S. This guy’s recent blog article on his Wharton MBA inspired me to make this post.

Quick little lesson on using the URI parse method, using an example:

uri = URI.parse("http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/")

uri.host = "www.mattmazur.com"
uri.scheme = "http"
uri.port = 80
uri.path = "/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/"

More details on URI including other methods here.

With Domain Pigeon progressing nicely, its time to start learning how to deploy it. While it won’t be ready for several weeks, part of it will be integrated with Paypal so its essential that I have plenty of time to develop and test that portion of it.

Most of my inital hosting research was from a three month old post on HackerNews regarding the best way to work on a Ruby on Rails app. Now I have to admit this is kind of stupid in retrospect… but I didn’t realize I could build and run a Rails app locally; I thought it had to be hosted somewhere. I quickly found out about InstantRails, which I’ve been using since then to experiment and do work. Now that it’s time to actually launch an app, I’m back where I started, looking for a good host.

The responses on that thread pointed to Slicehost, Heroku, Dreamhost, HostingRails, and a few others. I briefly considered learning how to be a system administrator so that I could configure and maintain my own slice at Slicehost, but after doing a little research I realize I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m better off finding a managed solution. Dreamhost seems to have a pretty good reputation, though their lack of focus on Rails turned me off it. HostingRails and Heroku both focused on Rails applications, which I like, so it was mainly a chioce between the two.

HostingRails seemed like a decent option. The reviews were generally favorable and most of the negative comments about downtime were from the 2006 period. The site was pretty well done, though some of the tutorials could have used a bit of work. I could even pay them a one-time sum of $79 and they would set up and configure my app to run on their servers. Or, if I wanted, I could use their tutorials to do it on my own. I looked through them and they seemed reasonable enough. One bad thing is that they require a year’s payment up front, which seems like a +EV move for the makers of a crappy product.

On to Heroku… I had been to Heroku several months back when this all started and when I came back yesterday to check it out I saw that everything was basically the same. That mistakenly led me to believe that the site wasn’t still being updated and for whatever reason was inactive. I later found out that that’s not the case. The site is very much active and the founders apparently are very helpful for whatever issues come up. I also thought that they posted a banner at the top of each site, but again, that was bad information; the banner is for the developer to access the control panel. It can be turned off as required.

I asked HN, which hasn’t disappointed yet, and surely enough they came back with clarifications and help on the issues I had with Heroku. This pretty much sums up their responses:

My experiences with heroku has been very positive so far: The online IDE and tools are very robust and they’ve been responsive to me when I needed to ask questions.

I don’t think you’ll be disappointed

And so, as the title suggestions, I’m going to use Heroku to host Domain Pigeon. I really have no idea what I’m getting into, but the site looks perfect for my skill level and site requirements.

Tomorrow, time permitting, I’m going to try to launch a test application so I can familiarize myself with the site.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I downloaded TextMate, the Ruby on Rails TextMate bundle, and watched a Peepcode screencast on how to use them. Kind of like that Macbook, I don’t know how I ever went without it.

Been fairly busy, but have been making some progress.

I started on a Rails site yesterday and I’m off to a nice start. It’s amazing how much of the syntax you forget when you go from reading about it to actually programming it. I constantly have to look up the most basic syntax issues, but hey, at least its actual progress.

Getting to experiment with the code to see how it affects the site is enjoyable.

I have about 4 hours of discretionary time each weekday. Some days I spend about 3 of that programming; others none. On average I get about 2 in by the time I eat, shower, and spend time with my wife.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a ping back on one of my recent blog posts originating from autocarsinsurance.net. I followed the link, curious why someone from an auto insurance domain would mention this site. The site didn’t load. I did a quick Google search for the domain and saw that there were lots of Ping Backs originating from the same domain. “Spam!”

I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I gotta commend them on their originality. Faking the Ping Back is a great way to lure bloggers to your spam site.

Next time, pick a more popular blog though… geeze…

I’m 90% of the way through Simply Rails 2. It’s an excellent book for someone like me who has no experience with Ruby or the Rails framework. I have about five SitePoint web development books now and all of them have been fantastic. The examples are practical, the explanations clear, and the they always excel at not bloating the book (which a lot of programming books do).

I also purchased Agile Web Development with Rails this evening, the original book on Rails. Althrough the third version of the book hasn’t been released yet you can buy an early PDF version here and they’ll ship you the paperback when its available in October.

I didn’t get much of a change to look through it, but it seems a lot more comprehensive than Simply Rails. That makes sense too, since it’s supposed to be the definitive text on the subject. Simply Rails is more of stepping stone into the more advanced concepts.

On unrelated subject, I found an old copy of Inc magazine this weekend. I try not to subscribe to too many magazines, since I rarely ever read them, but they had some great business articles including on on Twitter that was really interesting. Maybe I’ll actually read this one? ;)

TBD.