Day 1 - Introduction Posted on May 25, 2007 by Dave Fowler

Yesterday 3 guys moved with me into my parents basement. I have amazingly supportive parents, though they often wonder whether they adopted me. Most of us can't move to California for a week or two but we want to get started so we chose to do that here. We're all set up on a collection of desks I've accumulated over the years and along with the coffee shop my sister and I setup down here two days ago we have a pretty awesome mini startup hub.

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