Adam Christian

What happened?

As some of you may have heard, today I resigned from my position at Rearden Commerce. Leaving a company is never a fun thing, because you know how you feel when you hear that someone else is leaving.. and you can see it in people’s eyes. I have reminded myself multiple times today that I am still going to be 30 mins away, most of my communication with those people has been via email and IM and there is no reason for me not to stay in touch.

Why did I resign?

That’s a very good question. Let me preface this by saying that I really don’t have anything about Rearden that I can point at and say ‘this thing’ is why I left. Rearden is a great company, they were professional through out my entire experience there. They employ many very talented and driven engineers, and they have a great product. My gut feeling after spending some time there, is that they will do very well. The management team is very skilled and they know their market and niche extremely well. Every day I went to work I heard about a new major deal or a small company Rearden had acquired to contribute to their march toward owning the ‘Personal Assistant’ space.

When I first arrived there I struggled with two things, and ultimately wound up being my demise as an employee. I have an extreme passion for Open Source, being part of that community, and giving my time to contribute. So you are probably thinking, ‘Why didn’t I just do that on the side?’ — well the answer is that I did do it on the side and the results were slow and my sleep schedule paid the price. Rearden has a very business/enterprise specific niche at the moment, and building and deploying new features to those customers is a priority (as it should be), but I couldn’t stop my Open Source envy. 

Secondly, a overwhelming majority of their user base is using IE6. As a web developer — the last thing I do when building anything in client side JavaScript is to test it in IE6. I basically hold my nose, load the page and pray that things ‘mostly work’. Now I’m not going to claim that I can ever get away from doing this, but building really cutting edge features based on new technology becomes significantly less probable when you are catering to this crowd. I know that Rearden has some really cool future plans, and is publicly talking about bringing the application to the consumer market — but I’m impatient and I just simply didn’t want to wait.

What’s Next?

I am going to jump right into a gig with Slide Inc. as a Web Developer. However, before I get to any Web Development tasks I am going to be addressing a pretty serious need they have in their QA department. Slide currently has many applications that are used directly on their site, slide.com and on social networks (primarily facebook.com and myspace.com) and right now they have essentially no functional automation.

At OSAF I saw what a major difference automated testing can make, and the reason I am so excited about this is because I was a QA Engineer at one point manually testing a pretty complex web application (Cosmo) and I have seen how much a difference test automation can make in the release cycle, the development cycle, QA test cycles and simply the daily lives of your poor QA teams.

How am I going to accomplish this task you might ask? Thats the best part — I have fixed about 10 bugs in Windmill in the last week, and will be putting whatever effort is required into getting Windmill to a state where we can functionally automate all of Slides application testing. This looks to be a serious win for Slide, and a serious win for Windmill. 

At some point in the future, when I feel that this project is to the point where it can be maintained and built on by the Slide QA teams I will move on to Web Development tasks. At that point a smaller amount of time will still be allocated to maintaining Windmill, adding new features that Slide and the community need and working towards the next evolution of Windmill. That is quite a ways off in the future, so I will address all that when the time comes.

The rest of my ‘free’ development time, will be consumed by a project that I am involved in with the Mozilla Corporation. This project lives in the QA realm as well, and could probably be classified as a distant cousin to Windmill. More details about that will be announced the week of OSCON, so keep your eyes pealed.

Change can be extremely tough, but it is also very exciting. I want to thank all of my former peers at Rearden for a good experience, and I wish them all the absolute best.

This is my final business review from the high school era, however this one is especially important because it forced me to get my hands dirty with some serious database work and made me write more php boiler plate than I had ever dreamed up until this point. FYI, the person driving this business was a teacher at my high school (his last name goes in the graphic above).. that I never took a class from. He had spent a lot of time working in the appraisal part of the real estate market, and as with any repetitive process — people start to wonder how it could be automated and simplified.

Idea

The booming real estate markets of the late 90’s and early 00’s inspired many (especially those who had been involved in the industry) to start seeing dollar signs. As more people were buying and building homes, more appraisals and inspections were ordered. In case you haven’t been around anyone who does appraisal work, you should know that the research and comparison pieces of the report consume large chunks of time. 

There was a point in time where to get information about lots, land and peoples homes, you would have to physically go to the county assessors office and look through the stock piles of records, plat maps etc. to find you comparable properties in order to base your valuation. All of this information is publicly available and one just needs to go ask to see it. 

It didn’t take long for a few companies to spring up with the idea that they would aggregate all this data, and they did it well enough to make a pretty solid business out of it. However, the distribution of this data via companies like the MLS at that time were on CD’s which you received regularly and had to load onto your computer (I’m sure they still have this as an option) but Mr. Teacher had the idea that it would be much more convenient if people could just access all this data via the Internet. 

Stack

Incase you were wondering about the technology stack we were using to build this, it was as follows:
Apache Web Server, PHP3, MYSQL. Your standard LAMP stack, but before it was your “standard LAMP stack”.

Pitfalls

I must admit, that when I accepted this gig I really had no idea what I was getting into. I made promises that I wasn’t completely confident about, ultimately my lack of experience didn’t turn out to be the killer.

• For a site like this to succeed we would need many counties worth of data
• Data needs to be kept up to date (picking up CD’s all over the state every other day is unreasonable)
• Provided data was not in a reliable format
• CD’s full of 100 meg comma delimited files are difficult to work with
• Building a web based competitor to the MLS by yourself when you are 16 is rather daunting

To expand a bit on the above, even after I had a site designed, user logins working, profiles working, and the first round of data for each county searchable I still hadn’t even reached the bulk of the work. At this point my method was to create a PHP script for each file’s particular format and parse through it doing DB inserts. Since the format of each file (even new files for counties I already supported) had changing formats, I was continually updating the scripts trying to make the exploded entries in the arrays match up to the DB columns etc.

Killer

When you are looking to jump into any market, you first need to take a look at the competition. What is going to keep them from squashing you like a bug. Think about it, they have resources, money, people and hopefully some insight into the market. It is much easier for them to create and deploy than it is for you, and they will, and they did.

Not too long after our 4th or 5th iteration of data and some testing, MLS announced their web based service. Around that same time, many smaller (already existing) companies in the real estate market announced that they would be doing the exact same thing.

We could have forged ahead, we had a working rough beta and with some serious persistence we could have built up a small user base by offering lower pricing… but that wasn’t my top concern. I believe that after my involvement tapered down, Mr. Teacher continued forging forward. A moment ago I checked the domain where the beta was available, and it’s no longer even registered. 

Lessons

• Do your market research
• If time is an issue, hire a reasonable size team
• Always get signed contracts (I’m pretty sure he still owes me money)

As a web developer you are probably aware of that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you suffer when posed with the idea of testing your freshly written JavaScript that works perfectly in FireFox.

For years now, we have had to ’suck it up’, and pour a glass of scotch to get through an afternoon of testing in IE. As I am now a Web Developer at Rearden Commerce who currently caters to an audience of enterprise users instead of your standard bay area geek population — I have to make sure everything I commit works nicely in IE.

Last week after a few hours of IE testing, and dirtying my code I worked so hard to perfect and refine with alerts everywhere I decided that there HAD to be a better way to do this. I went ahead and spent many hours searching the web, installing everything I could find that promised to make IE development easier and happily I can say — it was a success.

First and foremost however, there are a few tips I can give you right off the top that will make your life easier. Before you take the plunge into line by line alerting, go through your code and do the following;

* Remove unnecessary commas in your data structures:

( FF ignores this one, but IE will give you an error that isn’t helpful )
ex.

var superNinjaObject = {
me: 'adam',
home: 'oakland',
};

* Don’t try to access characters in a string as if it was an array:

( Works in FF, but IE will simply give you undefined and not tell you a thing )
ex.

var myString = 'Welcome to the Jungle';
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString[14]; //Broken in IE
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString.charAt(14); //Compatible alternative

Now we can get to what you are really interested in, the new tools:

1. Internet Explorer Development Toolbar

Get It: Microsoft Downloads

This is Microsoft’s best stab at a firebug equivalent. This gives you all the flexibility you need to inspect the DOM tree, look at CSS, Scripts, Images, Network etc. To put it simply, it makes IE development something you can swallow. I can’t image going back to IE development without this. Unfortunately it is missing two things, the first is the absolutely necessary JavaScript shell. This can be solved by using the IE JS Bookmarklet that you can find at blog.monstuff.com. Add this to your favorites and then whenever you need a JS shell, pop this up and hack away ( I agree it would be nicer if it was built in ). The second is the ability to set breakpoints and step through your code debugging and introspecting objects and variables. I do have a solution for this, see new tool number

2. Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

Get It: Microsoft Express

This is the solution to your break pointing, stepping, introspecting needs. The way you use it is a bit awkward, but it does complete the development experience. To use this you need to create an empty web project and then start debugging. This will launch IE and bring you to a blank server page off the local MS web server instance. At this point you can go ahead and plug in the URL of the app you are wanting to test. Additionally if you have set any ‘debugger;’ statements in your source it will pick that up and automatically ask you if you want to start debugging there, or continue on. When you stop the debugging session in VWD it will kill your browser, so beware if you have to navigate to some deep point in your app you are probably going to get frustrated if you write buggy code. At it’s 1.4 Gb space requirement it’s hardly a comparison with firebug — but it’s certainly a step up from alerts all day long.

3. Microsoft Script Editor

Get It: Jonathanboutelle.com

If you don’t already have it installed, a good midpoint between nothing and Visual Studio Express is the Microsoft Script Editor which comes with office 2003, heres a video on how to use it, Video. Thanks for the feedback blogosphere.

I hope this made your life at least a small amount easier, happy IE developing.

This is more of a side note, but since I did find our logo while I was looking through my backups today I figured I might as well do a short post.

UpNorth Web Design took many of the ideas from my previous small ventures about doing contract web design/development and made them a little bit more realistic. At this point I was working with a guy who was pretty decent with graphic design, and another guy who was a really solid perl/cgi programmer.

We did a hand full of contracts for sites in the Bellingham area, and contracted to a few companies that did web development and had more work than they could handle. This small business also faded over time, as the three of us went off in different directions, however again I learned a few things.

1. Resume’s are really important to get any big contracts (people want to see examples, and recognize names).
2. Working from home with a small team is a very realistic way to do this kind of work. The lower the overhead the better.
3. Be persistent, build a portfolio.. and keep your domain alive and up to date - you never know when you are going to want to jump back into picking up more web design work to generate some spending money for your upcoming trip to Europe.

I have actually come up with another Business idea I worked on while I was still in high school, but it has a bit of a twist — so stay tuned.

As promised, my first entry in a line of startups that never happened is about ‘BoxBay Computers Inc.’.

Conception
The original idea came from a trip to CompuCare to buy a bunch of computer parts for a machine I was building. I drug along a friend of mine and my parents probably have a better idea of when exactly this was — but I am going to guess the summer of 1997 or 1998. The idea was that if a place like CompuCare can build relationships with vendors and get all these great deals on computer why can’t we do that too?

Execution
I knew enough to know that there would be money involved, and the friend of mine happened to be pretty good with numbers, so we decided that he would handle all the money and I would handle all the computer stuff. Before I really knew what was going on, he had headed down to the city to apply for a business license. Another good friend of mine was knee deep in design as he cranked out an actually very attractive web site and the next thing we knew we had boxbay.com online and sorta ready for some attention. BoxBay of course coming from the fact that we lived right on Bellingham Bay, and that we would be selling computer ‘boxes’, sounds like reasonable logic to me! The garage at my house had tools, gardening equipment and a couple boats in it, but it was the summer so what would be a better time than to move everything out to make way for our new computer business. At this point we have a business license, a metal box with about 40 dollars in it, a nice to look at but otherwise useless web site, and absolutely nothing to sell. The next step was to mail off all kinds of things to hardware vendors so that we could get really kickin’ deals and sweep all of our competition off their feet. After signing up for all the whole sale programs the mail started arriving.

After the initial excitement of the free posters and stickers we got, we quickly realized that the only way we would get any deals on hardware was if we ordered it in bulk. The more we ordered the cheaper things would get by the unit. This is very simple stuff that you would think a couple smart high school freshman would have known at this point, but nothing drives the point home like a real world example.

Collapse
We collected hardware orders from everyone we knew, including going far over our budget for our personal ‘upgrades’ to our machines and were still somewhere around 195 orders short to get the very lowest discount a business could get. Somewhere around this point we sort of became bored of the whole thing, and had ‘hung out’ for too many long summer days in a row and it was now time to head off to something new and interesting. I have no idea what that was, but I do remember running around the neighborhood playing tag with roman candles (So that puts us in the ball park of the 4th of July for this whole endeavor).

Conclusion
Never go sign up for a business license until you really plan to do something with it. The thing costs money, they continually contact you and if you don’t take care of it you can wind up paying a bunch of fees. This will not be the last time in my career to make this exact mistake. We received mail for this dead computer company for many years after this, and as you can imagine my folks were not super happy to be the mailing address for anything ‘BoxBay Computers’ related that showed up at the house.

Additionally, a very important lesson I didn’t forget from this whole experience was that businesses cost money, doing business costs money, and making money costs money. This point came up daily, in almost every class I took while I was on the road to my BA in Business — but by that point I was fully prepped for that multiple choice question in Economics, Finance, Accounting, Entrepreneurship etc. wow, that makes me think school should actually make people try to start a business instead of… well that’s a story for another day.

Note

Coronix.net (I was really into Unix, and thought I liked Cervesa..) was even shorter lived than BoxBay, however in reality did have a much higher chance of survival — and it did for a few weeks

Coronix was going to be a Web Design company, that did custom web sites for every business in town. You are probably thinking ‘Oh man that market is flooded’, and it is, but it wasn’t in 1999. The web site was covered with images I had designed in Bryce 2, there was text jammed in between the massive images of completely out of context items including trees, rocks, probably a modeled waterfall I found in a tutorial and many kitchen appliances I found in free Bryce object files. There was a contact form that called a CGI and sent my hotmail account a completely unformatted string of inputs from the user.

I was the ‘web developer’ in that I knew how to use Dreamweaver, had learned HTML in 7th and 8th grade and considered myself a master. I also knew how to do roll over buttons with JavaScript, but really had no idea how it was possible to do what I was doing. Eventually this web site evolved into me downloading the entire source for the Microsoft.com web site at the time (which was baby blue, with JavaScript drop down menus to all their products) and CSS to make the hyperlinks change color. The bar across the top also rounded in the right corner — which I had to have.

Coronix died a peaceful death, as the domain expired the content stayed alive on a friends 9.99 a year hosting account until he forget to pay the bill. However during this period of time I did wind up doing about 5 web sites for people I knew in the area, and sparked my interest in CGI… which slowly evolved into PERL, then PHP and finally Python (also a story for another day). I would forever enjoy making money off of web sites, and making web sites for absolutely no money, reason or purpose other than my creative zing.

We will jump a few years into the future next time, and check out how facebook really did steal my idea.. no seriously they really did — I have a newspaper article written by the WSU news paper about this web site about 2 months before wsufacebook.com showed up! Okay okay, all that goes in the next entry, stay tuned.

Over the past ten years I have started in on countless business startup ideas. This is a great example of how low percentage ‘my spaces’ and ‘facebooks’ are in their survival. These different ideas have been in many market spaces and targeting totally different groups of people, yet somehow none of them turned into the ‘next big thing’. Some made it to a usable web site status, some just a prototype, others just an idea and a photoshop mockup. Each time I switch to a new startup idea to be working on I archive all the work I had done on the previous one incase I have all kinds of ‘extra’ time at some point to go back and finish it just for fun.

At this point it looks unlikely that I will be going back and resurrecting these projects from the dead (especially at the rapidly evolving rate of change in todays technology industry). So I am going to start sharing them with the world, and if you have an inspiration — feel free to go ahead and use it. You can even feel free to send me huge gobs of money for the great idea I inspired..

My plan at this point is to start as far back as I can date wise, and do an entry a week on a different business (or variation of a business). This way I can recap what was good about them, what killed them, and maybe learn a bit from this whole process.

There are a few stealth things that I probably won’t be sharing, and many of these were in collaboration with other people so if I accidently post your inner most secret project you are still working on from seven years ago — please let me know.

To give you a small preview it looks like the next entry will be a few of my very early ventures lumped into one.. because when you are 15 it’s hard to concentrate on any one thing for too long. Upcoming startup recaps include (coronix.net and boxbay computers), stay tuned!