“I have a Startup” Midwest vs. Bay Area

I continue to post though as this startup is all about sharing the things you learn and this was a big one this summer. I wish I had found a post like this when I was first searching for Zope3/Plone experiences and hope others in my position find it in the future.A few months ago we made a huge team decision to scrap the month and a half we spent learning Zope3/Plone for our future content creation/collaboration site and switch to Django.

It was a really tough decision. Plone is an awesome content management system. Its built with python, has an amazing community, I had/have a Google Summer of Code in it, and the clincher: its already capable of doing 90% of what we want our site to do. It manages users great, handles blogs, wikis, profiles. It was mouth watering, and to be honest was my main source of confidence in the idea that we’d be able to pull off such a complicated site.

That confidence slowly deteriorated over our first month of learning Plone. I bought every book on Plone and Zope3 and in that first month in my parent’s basement Priyesh and I spent day and night learning the stuff. I read almost all of two Zope3 books and one on Plone. They made no sense to me. I kept re-reading them and going over examples. I could develop the examples just fine but I couldn’t figure out how to write my own.

I couldn’t get a feel for it. The concepts of interfaces, utilities, adapters, viewlets, ZCML, etc just weren’t meshing. This bothered me tremendously as I’ve been programming since childhood and consider myself (perhaps falsely so) at least halfway skilled in python and web development.

Note: I later found out that some of my problem was that, though only a few years old the Zope3 Developer’s Handbook has fairly outdated Zope3 methodology.

I looked around for classes as I decided its just the type of stuff you have to have a teacher for. The Plone community has fairly regular 2-3 day classes but none lined up with our location or timeline. I am almost certain that had I been able to take one of the Plone courses it would have come together fairly easy. As an alternative I found that a Plone sprint being hosted at the Googleplex! I went and tried helping out as I blogged about earlier. I wanted to get a feel for Zope3 and thought that it might inspire that “snap” in fluency where it’d suddenly be obvious how all of those components work in Zope3.

During the sprint I got to talk with Alexander Limi, one of the founders of Plone, who explained that Plone is in a very transitional state, attempting the crazy but so far successful task of slowly merging between Zope2 and Zope3. For those of you who aren’t in the know Zope3 is almost a completely different framework from Zope2. He explained that Plone will be incredibly difficult to learn for the next year or so as it completes its transition. New comers would have to learn both the old as well as the new and all the crazy ways in which they bridge the gap.

He was confident though, and rightfully so, that the Plone community was strong enough to make it through that year with very little new blood. He very humbly recommended going with a different framework for our startup; advice that we were already considering and took soon after. Plone may have already given us 90% of our site, but we decided that having to write the last 10% in Zope3 might take us longer than starting from zero.

Having lost so much time by judging a book by its cover we decided to do a great deal of reading and research before choosing our next framework. I had done a good deal of web development several years ago but a lot of fancy new and helpful frameworks have fortunately popped up since then!

We took a week, each of us diving into one or two frameworks, sharing what we liked and didn’t like about each. Our benchmark for each framework was the ease and accuracy with which we could replicate Jared’s One Blog. We’re still intending on posting our sometimes humorous results but haven’t had a public server up and running until recently.

As was already spoiled, we went with Django. I’d heard a lot of good things and they’ve so far been proven. For the most part we really enjoy developing in Django, though it can be frustrating to replicate features we already know are implemented in Plone . There’s no on the shelves book on it (I like buying lots of books), the documentation doesn’t go very deep, and the community is significantly less active than Plone’s. The framework though, at least to me, just makes more sense. It was ridiculously easy to replicate the One Blog and problems with missing documentation can usually be solved with looking at a little source code or whining in IRC.

The change in game-plan has given us more work that we expected to do at the beginning of the summer. As I said, we thought we were 90% there and pretty much lost a month of development. Startups are all about obstacles though! Since the change we’ve been making tremendous progress and will be opening an Alpha to a few friends/advisors within the week.

Perhaps one day someone will open source a version of Plone in Django! Maybe that will be us. Djone? Glono?

zoPE <-> PlonE as djanGO <-> GlonO

Dave

The life of a founder is a dangerous but highly lucrative one. It’s a very fast and most often short path but the opportunities attract a certain type to the profession every year. Women, to their inevitable downfall, are helplessly attracted to this type of person. They picture me on the battle grounds of the startup front, typing as fast as my masculine hands will take me and reading as fast as my eagle eyes can pass over a page. Knocking down book after book like a mad gunner in a prairie bunker, I absorb knowledge with an evil vengeance all to carve my own space among the tech giants of the corporate world.

They see the amazing speed at which I develop Web 2.0 applications, all to gain the advantage of first on the hill so that I may become king and destroy those who climb alongside me. They gawk at the amazing amount of Pepsi’s and carbohydrates I need to fuel me for the day and marvel at the boyish figure I’m still able to maintain. They fear the current of novel ideas pulsing through my powerful mind and wonder all the while how it is that I deal with so much danger on a daily basis and still survive.

The secret is something I discovered many years ago. It’s an awakening discovery and I’m about to spill it so prepare yourselves:

Danger Never Takes a Vacation.

Bam! There it is. Now that you’ve heard it you know it’s true and you probably see life completely differently. It doesn’t. It never vacates. While you put yourself to bed in your comfy home in the suburbs after your long day at your cushy corporate job that you got because of your fancy college degree and all of your sappy community service, you might think you’ve got it all figured out and danger has left you for the allure of fresh tropical drinks on the beaches of Brazil, but you would be wrong. Dead wrong, and maybe even dead. It hasn’t left, it’s still there, it never, ever, in a billion years, vacates.

After this realization two things may happen to you. Your awareness to the surrounding danger cripples you with fear and you helplessly cling to men such as myself who are seemingly immune to it. This is the path taken by the women I’ve discussed. In the other path, you will realize that the danger has been there all along and you’ve been surviving just fine. In this case you will be inspired to grab your metaphorical hatchet, tear off your suffocating clothing and run into the untamed forest looking for something to kill. In either case your awareness of the danger will dramatically heighten your appreciation for life.

Some readers might find what I’ve written to be a little grandiose, but I assure you everything I’ve said is completely true, or rather it probably would be if the life of a startup founder ever crossed paths with women…

Dave

Anyway, I’m setting up my macbook and and have to change all of my settings and download my favorite apps. Luckily, because of what I’ve shared the thingsilearned on this blog the process has been incredibly easy. I found my favorite version of emacs, added xml support, modified my terminal, altered my hosts file to combat my internet addiction, and dropped in my screw script so Jared3 can curse back at me.

It was just cool to utilize so much content, and its all still just 4 guys on a flat blog! Soon everyone will be able and encouraged to share and with the improved tools we’re building into JaredSIM. JaredSIM will be an awesome storage place for the thingsilearned … awesome.

Dave

Lets start from the beginning with the childhood of a one Mr. Jared Lee.

[The setting: a small private lake in northern Wisconsin. Camera zooms in from helicopter view on a young curious boy floating in an old tire tube reading an article on nimbostratus clouds in the N volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica. Que Narator]

Narator: In a world of common people, going about their common tasks in their common everyday ordinary regular ways, a young boy was born and raised away from its influences…

[kill narator]

Ok, I went a little overboard, back to regular story telling style. Jared was home schooled the majority of his childhood. His older brothers were moved away to college and he spent all of his time with his parents enjoying the frills of life that typical 50 year olds enjoy. Jared loved reading non-fiction, politics, religion, nature, radio, talking about the weather, photography, watching sports and other mature activities. It was during this time that, with the learning power of youth combined with the interests and intelligence of someone well beyond his years, Jared acquired almost all practical knowledge. Note: you might have to back over that last sentence, it was a big one.

After graduating high school Jared decided to go to Gustavus Adolphus College and obtain a degree in physics, one of the few subjects he hadn’t already learned. It was there in the dark rooms of Olin Hall that Jared and I, along with the other physics majors, would study all hours of the night. As would be expected with long periods of study tons of questions, both physics and non-physics related, were posed to the group: “Who was the 8th president of the United States?” “How much does a pizza cost at the caf?” “What’s the name of that girl that Cory made out with last week?” “Where are the beer specials today?” “What day is it?” “Is Jolene Right?” “When is our next frisbee game?” etc.

Some of those are easier to answer than others (Cory’s dating habits have never been tough to follow and if it’s not physics related, Jolene doesn’t even get rhetorical questions right.), but miraculously, no matter the difficulty, Jared could answer all non-physics questions.

It was a feat that remained unappreciated and even unnoticed until the semester Jared studied abroad in Australia. Suddenly when posing similar questions “What will the weather be like in by the time i go outside?” “Who shot JFK?”, the group wouldn’t know. We were lost, and decided that we’d have to start going downstairs to the computers and using a rising technology called the Internet and a search engine (Google) we had heard about others using to solve similar queries. After several unanswered searches (“Is Jolene Right?”), it was obvious that no technology existed that could adequately replace Jared. We had temporary hope that soon Jared would return but also realized the loss we would experience upon graduation.

It was then put on me, the sole member of the group with computer programming skills, to simulate Jared so that we all, and the rest of the world, could have the advantages of those in his presence. The project/life task was called JaredSIM and is being carried out in several different sub projects. So far the following have been kicked off with varying successes: Jared.trader, Jared.survivor, Jared.hockey, and now Jared.learn. So you see the goal of JaredSIM is the mass production and distribution of the resources of Jared Lee and the goal of ThingsILearned.com is to acquire all of the things that Jared has learned in digital form.

So you see there was a very simple explanation. I hope it got you excited to help teach!

Dave

The four of us along with Jame’s girlfriend Anna are subletting a condo in Daly City, just 10 minutes south of San Francisco. The place is big and the complex has two pools and a nice club house that I will make my office as soon as we can figure out a way to get our internet out that far. We have few furnishings except for a kitchen table and a few things we brought and have collected: air mattresses, couches from bay area family, homemade computer desk from the side of the road, some lamps, a foosball table. I was expecting a bit more hustle and bustle from the area but our complex happens to be in the middle of a mile of cemetery in each direction. Seriously, check the map. In the case of any sort of zombie attack we’re pretty much screwed. James says that with our surplus of Cosco food we could hold out for quite a while, but especially after seeing 28 weeks later I’m not naive enough to think they wouldn’t fireball the whole place.

Anyway, you can send us packages (hint: food) at that address though it probably only had a 50% chance of actually getting to us. There seems to be a lot of problems with the way packages are delivered around here.

The good thing about our location is that its only 2 miles from the BART which goes all over the place. I’m going to have to take that and the Caltrain to get to Stanford twice a week for my class. I bought a bike today to make that trip a little shorter. I rode the BART a couple times into San Francisco already to hang out with my friend Josh Aas from Firefox. Unfortunately we weren’t out seeing Caroline Smith but he was in town for the amazing WWDC and invited me to hang out with some cool people afterward including some Camino developers, another GSoC student and Ben from the awesome startup Songbird.

I’ve also been to Stanford twice where we recruited our friend Zain for the team. Zain is a super bright guy who’s in the middle of his PhD at Stanford under Mark Horowitz, a founder of Rambus. Zain’s hooking us up with a server on the insanely fast stanford network, the original ISP for google! Stanford is an awesome awesome place. They get tons of money from wealthy alumni and venture capital. Their president is an EE professor supposedly worth over a billion dollars. There are startup clubs, classes, and recruitment posters all over. Its an incredibly exciting place. I’m glad I decided to take my summer course there instead of online.

As you can see its been a crazy week, and somehow among all of that we still got quite a bit of work done. More to come on the project soon.

Oh, and a shoutout/congratulations to my friend and reader Zack Garbow. Zack’s been somewhat of a patent mentor to me at IBM and just became IBM’s youngest Master Inventor breaking the previous record by 4 years! Way to go Zack! You may have 60 more patents than me but I’m still racing you to 100.  He also wrote an awesome facebook app.  If you’re cool you’ll add it.

Dave

Perhaps more could be said on best practices for business cards. I would not be the one to ask. Rather, here’s what was used to make some of the effects seen above.

The logo: A free font was used, with blending options set to inner shadow, gradient overlay, and stroke. In order to keep the logo consistent with any future color choices, I used transparent blend modes like overlay and multiply.

Shapes: By keeping them as vector-type shapes in their own layer, I could quick edit the position of the vertices without loss of quality.

The figure: Solid black lines over layers of solid colors with no dodge or burn layers, painted at 300% resolution and down-sampled for the business card, which was further down-sampled for web viewing.

Color: A case study in trial and error. The color will probably be tweaked for a while to come. (It was suggested that bright colors would look friendly and personable, like our friend Jared.)

Vu

Anyway, I applied for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) grant. For those of you who don’t know what it is, Google is just such an awesome company that they sponsor, with real money, students to work on open source projects. One of the projects they sponsor was Plone who just so happen to need an improved commenting infrastructure. I’m happy to say I got the opportunity and am now working with mentor Wichert Akkerman. There seems to be a great interest/need in the community for the improvement. Jon Stahl was nice enough to blog about his ideas and advice on Improving Plone Comments. I look forward to making a good product.

So I guess that once we finally decided what our startup was going to do, I was already pretty bias toward what programing language and web framework I wanted to use . It will be great to work as part of the Plone community while using it for our startup. The GSoC will also provide us with a little spending cash for the summer! So far we’ve just been climbing the steep learning curve of Zope/Plone and get more and more impressed with its current functionality. One day, no doubt, I’ll curse it for poor scalability or difficulty in expansion, but for building a prototype of a complicated web app there’s nothing else like it.

Dave

Lets see, the site’s been up a month or so now. With 200 hits per month, if I added adsense we’d pull in an estimated $.02 a month! That’s getting scarily close to profitability!For a progress report: we’re still stuck in Minnesota for a week more. Priyesh and I are working hard learning Zope/Plone in my parent’s basement. James is in California booking our summer sublet and Vu is home packing up his apartment for the summer trip.

We’ve ironed out all of the details of what we’re making. Its going to be really exciting! We’re mostly done with the executive summary and applied to the Minnesota Cup. I’ll be sure to post what exactly we’re making as soon as I can .

Anyway, 200 page views! Thanks for celebrating with us.

Dave

So far we’ve just been setting up, fresh installing Ubuntu 7.04, shooting around ideas and testing out a variety of web frameworks we’re considering. We’ve got some really good ideas and in combination they’re going to be something amazing. Am I sure exactly what yet? No. Am I sure it will be awesome? Yes. The web frameworks we’re checking out are Django, Ruby on Rails, Zope/Plone, and PHP/MySQL. I personally only have experience with the last, and am not a big fan. I’m a huge Python fan however so I’m personally hoping Django or Zope/Plone win out. I’m learning the setup of Plone now, a process with a decent learning curve, though that’s expected. At the awesome Barcamp Minnebar event a month ago I stayed longer than I was planning to check out a great discussion panel on web frameworks featuring the impressive David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails himself. The discussion was helpful but I decided I still needed to try them all out myself. I’ll post later our results and maybe some discussion on our experience on the first day with each framework.

If you noticed in the previous thread, I’ve invited the other guys on the team to the blog. Hopefully they’ll also include their experiences and things they learned. Here’s an introduction to the whole team. We all know each other through HKN, the Electrical Engineering Honor Society and recruited each other at various points over the past 2 months.

Vu Dang

Vu has a bachelors in Electrical Engineering and has a variety of hobbies including writing and art. Vu interestingly decided not to tackle a job after graduating this December. Instead he’s pursuing his own interests. We recently (last week) talked him into joining the team and moving with us out to California. He’ll be an excellent addition with his artistic abilities and writing skill combined with his engineering knowhow.

Dave Fowler

Dave will receive his Masters in EE at the end of the summer and has a few undergrads. He has a huge imagination and a good amount of technical abilities that’ve landed him 10 patents so far. He’s extremely project oriented and looking forward to putting in the long hours like he did in his Physics days. He is the only member that does not come from a background of entrepreneurs.

Priyesh Jain

Priyesh has an undergrad in Computer Engineering and will begin his Masters in Computer Science in the fall. He’s from India and spends what little free time he has volunteering for assistive engineering projects. He was recruited to the team a few weeks ago when we found out he hadn’t been swept up by an internship yet. He’s an intelligent and hard worker and will be an incredible addition to the technical aspects of the project.

James Skarie

James has a masters in EE with a thesis in Databases. He comes from a background of entrepreneurs and refuses to take a regular job. The team was first assembled when James contacted Dave to get lunch, and both showed up planning to talk the other into doing a startup.

It’s going to be an interesting summer.

Dave