Tools and Technology

While Rich is networking his way up and down the western US, I’m staying home in Brighton, England working on the tools and technology behind our Web2Thing.

Soon we’ll tell you more soon about what this Web2Thing does, but for now, I wanted to talk through a few of the good and beautiful tools and technologies that are helping us put this thing together.

I’ve been writing software for a long, long time. I must have written my first computer program in something like 1979, in Basic on a Wang sort-of half word processor and general purpose computer. There’s a point to this reminiscing: back then, pre-Internet and open source, you pretty much had to use the tools available. Now, we have such riches in a seemingly infinite larder of tools, languages, technologies, services. You name it, you dream of it, and with help from Google and Yahoo!, you find it. Somebody has made what you want.

Now endless choice can get you stuck. You can keep changing tools all the time and spend you life configuring them. Same with software. So what do we do? Fix on something we love and just love it and use it.

Here’s part of the tools and services we are using. Rich and I are building a business and a service while living the other side of the world to each other. So, a lot of what we do is by nature online. Huge props to the makers of these wonderful things that keep us moving along.

Corporate stuff:

We use Basecamp for basic todo lists and occasional messages. Our corporate planning todos are there at the moment. We started using basecamp at the very beginning for everything but over time we’ve migrated bits to other things, as I’ll talk about later.

Walking the talk, we use Writely for corporate documents and Google Spreadsheets for working financial and other calculations. You really have to get together with somebody across the world and start working on some traffic projections in a Google Spreadsheet with built in chat to appreciate how powerful a shared spreadsheet it. If/when it gets xmlrpc calls in Google Spreadsheets, I’ll build the dashboards for server management using it.

Development infrastructure:

We just pulled the todos out of Basecamp and the source code out of a local filesystem into a Trac/Subversion environment. We’re renting the Trac/Subversion service from hosted-projects.com who offer a setup Trac/Subversion setup for something silly like $7 per month. At that price, it is hard to justify spending the time to get it running and configured on our own servers, even though we have them sitting there. And it gives that nice feeling of having our code in at least three places spread across the Internet.
Trac’s integrated wiki and ticket system is just what we need as we head towards a release and have multiple people working on the codebase modules as we move forward.

On the server(s):

We pretty much go with the LAMP stack, as you might expect. Debian Linux for now, maybe FreeBSD later, MySQL, now v4, soon v5. Apache of course. And python. Not php or perl. Remember what I was saying about choosing the tools you love? Well that is why python is there. It is pretty unbeatably good at what we are doing and is nicely maintainable, at least in my opinion.

So, to make python sing for the web, we’re using Myghty, and enterprise-level templating framework (a python version of Perl’s HTML::Mason) and the totally magic SQLAlchemy object-relational mapper. Put these together with python and (IMHO) you end up with enough structure to make web apps easy, without it all getting too much in the way. This is a magic wand I can wield without making my arm sore.
And the rest are the little day to day things:

• Rich and I keep in touch using Skype IM and voice and exchange a lot of emails.
• Plain A4 sheets of paper and a 0.5mm pencil.
• NovaMind for making Mindmaps (for those times when only a mind-map can solve a problem nicely.)
• Apple OS X and Powerbooks that just keep running without reboots.
• occasionally Microsoft Office for business plans and stuff.
• many, many cups of Tea.

So there you have it. Written out like this, I see just how much infrastructure we have already. So that is why it took so long to get this far

technorati tags:Tools, web2thing

Next Stop Gnomedex

Clay and I are sitting at SFO domestic–the Alaskan flight is delayed an hour and a half–and fortunately we’ve found a free wifi hotspot. God knows whose it is, but we’re grateful.

Next stop on the “summer of love West Coast blogging conference circuit” is Gnomedex up in Seattle. I’ve never been to the home of Microsoft, so I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like. Not that we’ll be anywhere near Bill’s place.

I had the chance to say hi to Chris Pirillo at BloggerCon, and he seems like a really nice genuine guy. So I’m looking forward to the event, and perhaps another quick chat with the man and Ponzi.

So far I’ve networked a lot, shown a few people the Web2Thing concept, and had some great feedback. It’s suprising, but I’m even more excited about launching than previously, and that’s saying something given how eager I’ve been for months.

I also stumbled across a great name for the service, and the domain was available. Finally, we think we’ve got our real name–more on that in the future.

BloggerCon Day 2

We had dinner with the BloggerCon crowd last night. It was great fun and we got to chat some amazing people, like Buzz Bruggeman.

This morning we’re sitting in the second day of BloggerCon, and Clay and I have established that it’s much more relaxing than SuperNova. Different purpose, and of course a different people, and much more conversations. The later making it a heap more useful so far.

Don’t get me wrong, SuperNova was great for networking, and there are just some unreal people there, but the sessions focused more on the corporate space, and the new web has accelerated beyond them. BloggerCon people are all in the slip stream, creating it in fact, so they don’t have to rehash what we all know.

The current session is a little empty, but I guess that’s to be expected. It is only just past 9am on a Saturday morning.

10,000 Miles For The Backchannel

For an entrepreneur in Perth Australia it’s a big deal to take a trip to the US for two weeks as part of launching a startup. It costs A LOT, and given the 24 hour travel time the jet lag can make you a mess.

So the question is what value is there making a trip to several conferences for someone who is still operating in stealth mode.

Fortunately I had one major goal: finding potential advisors. So I’ve chatted with a few people over here with that in mind, and have been happy with the result so far.

It certainly isn’t the content of the conference. Although there has been some interesting topics, many of them only scratch the surface. It’ll be interesting to contrast Supernova 2006 with a couple of un-conferences in the next couple of days (Bloggercon and Barcamp).

The backchannel at Supernova has been fun, and also a nice little way of networking and introducing myself. Of course the hallway sessions have been the most valuable, and I’ve been able to meet and chat with some cool people.

It seems like I’ve been here so long, but in reality it’s only been two days of sessions. So, I’ll have much more to report next week.

Tips For Startups

A few months ago there was a great deal of discussion on if it is the right climate to start a new company (especially in the web 2.0 space in Silicon Valley).

Without delving into the arguments for and against, I stumbled across two blog posts in the last 10 minutes that suggest now is a great time, if only because the amount of resources available to an entrepreneur are so vast.

Ben Barren points to an article by Don Dodge discussing Kleiner Perkins’ 7 rules for software start-ups. Moments earlier I was reading a tidy list of 5 Steps to Building Better Websites.

There are surely arguments that’d complain of information overload, but when I fly out tomorrow I’ll also be armed with a bunch of podcasts that’ll provide another range of tips, tricks, advice and case studies.

There hasn’t been a better time to start a business, if only because of the ease by which I can access everyone else’s knowledge.

Web2Thing Weblog

At the end of 2005, while enjoying a beer and pizza at Little Creatures in Fremantle, Graeme and I were having one of our regular conversations that dug into everything tech . There’s always something wonderful about the atmosphere pre-summer, and the only real way to enjoy it is with a brew.

I can remember sitting at the table chatting about a particular problem that both of us had encountered on the Internet, and slowly a concept evolved. After a few weeks of banter we decided that the concept was compelling enough to bootstrap, and we’ve been working on it since.

I sure didn’t realize how hard, and long, the process of deciding on a name for an Internet business is: domain name availability, trademarks, clarity, and meaning, making for a tough exercise. So to facilitate opening the communication channel slightly, we’ve pre-named it Web2Thing, and launched this weblog.

This weekend Graeme is at @media Social and geek dinner, and next week I’m boarding a plane for Supernova and Gnomedex. We’re hoping to have a chat with a few people about Web2Thing, show them our alpha demo, and begin the hunt for an advisory board.

In the mean time we intend to discuss the process of launching Web2Thing–which eventually will have that meaningful name–on this weblog. So, please stay tuned by returning to the blog, or subscribe to our feed.