home · blog · groups · about us · contact us
DevelopmentNow Blog
 Tuesday, January 15, 2008
 
 

So I ran across a 7-month-old blog post from Guy Kawasaki on how Truemors.com cost him around $12,000 to launch.

Basically, it's a straightforward site where people can submit news, rumors, buzz, etc. It's a modified version of WordPress, allowing anonymous posting, and it's nice looking. A few thoughts based on the article:

  • Note how even though the post is "old", the message is still relevant.
  • Note how 30-40% of his costs were on legal fees (!)
  • Note how he didn't have to spend a ton of money on development -- he whipped together a simple, easy, user-generated content (UGC) web site by modifying existing packages. That's what we do for building social networks, and it saves our clients a ton of money.
  • Note how he didn't do a big up-front plan -- he just did it. Then again, the cost was so low that it probably wasn't worth doing a large business plan.
  • Note how the site took off due to his contacts and connections (and a bit of luck?), not due to any killer feature.

 

Web
January 15, 2008    Bookmark to Digg or other social bookmarking
#    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]



 Monday, January 14, 2008
 
 

Next Open Coffee Club meeting is on January 23rd, downtown stumptown, at 10am. Meet up with other web-savvy folks and have a great cup of joe, too. A win-win!

Read more here: http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004481519-5

And at www.opencoffeeclub.org

 

January 14, 2008    Bookmark to Digg or other social bookmarking
#    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]



 
 

As an IT manager, you'll have team members who initially aren't able to get things done as quickly as you or other experienced team members can. A good portion of that productivity gap is due to their lack of your codebase, development process, etc. So one way you can speed their progress is to ensure that they have access to domain knowledge through a wiki, training videos, documentation, shadowing other programmers, etc.

There's an old joke about how knowledge is most of the battle.

There was a business whose expensive machine suddenly stopped working. Since the machine was vital to daily operations, they called in an expert to do the repairs. The expert looked at the machine, checked a few settings, pulled out a hammer, and rapped the machine lightly on the side. The machine instantly sprang to life and the business was able to move forward with its work.

The delighted business owner said, "Great, what do I owe you?" to which the expert replied "That'll be $100."

"100 dollars?" the owner cried. "But you were only here for 5 minutes! $100 for one swing of a hammer doesn't seem worth it."

So the expert quickly wrote up an itemized invoice and handed it to the owner. The owner reviewed the invoice, sighed, shrugged, nodded, and paid the expert his $100.

On the invoice were two line items:

Swinging the hammer -- $1
Knowing where to swing the hammer -- $99

One of the things I do is help new team members know "where to swing the hammer" by suggesting approaches, resources, or even the particular modules, files, & functions that they would probably be working with. I ease up on that direction as they come up to speed, but I feel it's valuable initially to help new people focus in on the problem and still get things done. I'm not robbing them of a chance to learn the systems, since I'm only providing a high-level suggestion, and they'll still be working on the code in depth.

January 14, 2008    Bookmark to Digg or other social bookmarking
#    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]



 Wednesday, January 02, 2008
 
 

Happy New Year folks. And, here's an interesting link to some Joomla! 1.5 performance testing. I find it interesting because

  1. Joomla! 1.5 beta 2 was slower than good ol' Joomla! 1.0.13 RC
  2. There were discussions of a number of PHP caching techniques which can be applied to any PHP system

The caching techniques covered were "file caching" (which sounded like filebased output buffering aka Cache_Lite_Output to me), Alternative PHP Cache (APC), eAccelerator and Memcache. xcache was mentioned in the comments but not tested.

So if you're interested in a quick overview & comparison of some PHP cachine techniques, go ahead and read the article ... I found it interesting that despite memcache's reputation, its performance fell behind other caching methods.

Linux | Web
January 2, 2008    Bookmark to Digg or other social bookmarking
#    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]