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)

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.