A really small start-up

Long time...

2008-10-08T01:17:00.000-07:00

Promising to keep a blog updated seems harder than keeping a new year's resolution. Here is a quick up-date on what we have been up to.

- We worked pretty hard in August and the first half of September and than have recently experienced a great slow down....We have been EXTREMELY distracted by all the events that seem to be unfolding on a almost daily basis. Please make the financial crisis, Sarah Palin and the presidential election drama stop... So we can get back to doing real work

- We are struggling with a name and yet to find a good one. In the meantime we have bought about twenty five domain names and even wasted away $1K on one, which we prob. might not want to use :(

- In the meantime, we have a very very alpha version of our product. We have a handful of very close friends and family using it. If you are interested in helping us with feedback and testing. Mail us - bindureddy at gmail.com

Laying the pipes

2008-07-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

We spent the first couple of weeks getting a lot of the technical plumbing in place for our startup, and since Bindu has been bugging me to post on this blog, here goes...

It has been more than 6 years since I have been involved in a startup and even though I have known all along that things have progressed leaps and bounds, its really great to experience it first hand!

For one, it is a lot easier to get away without hosting your own servers until we get a decent amount of traffic. After a false start with The Planet (service and networking kinda sucked), I found a pretty good dedicated server hosting place over at M5 hosting. The folks are very knowledgeable and flexible and they seem quite transparent with their availability stats. Amazon S3 seems to be another god-send for things like media hosting.

We debated a little bit between PHP and Python for the web app, and we chose PHP mainly because of the ease of use and quick iteration for web development. Python didn't really have a good templating language that appealed to us, and we didn't want to spend any time rolling our own. PHP also has this really great batteries included philosophy and things just work.

Being a big believer in using the right tool for the right job, I really wanted to try and breakup up the application into different parts which could be written in possibly different languages. Facebook thrift seemed like a natural choice for the glue, although I did look at Google protocol buffers recently open-sourced. Though I lived and breathed it for 4 years, the big show-stopper was the fact that server side code wasn't included. Also, I liked the thrift bindings for higher level structs like maps and lists and of course, more comprehensive language support (including PHP). One not so good thing about thrift is that the documentation is pretty weak (and sometimes wrong) and I have had to look in the source a few times already to figure things out. Things will likely improve on this front now that it is an Apache project.

With thrift, we can hopefully leverage many other tools/open source projects to do some heavy lifting in separate servers keeping the PHP frontend simple. Using something like thrift also gives us easy cross-language serialization/deserialization of blobs of data in logs and in database columns.

Like most people, I rely heavily on Google web search to lookup tech stuff on new languages, toolkits, setups, etc. and I must say that tech searches have gotten a lot more spammy over the years, and trying to answer them does take a bit more search time than it used to. One vast improvement on this front is Google Code Search which is great for quick answers when it comes to programming questions. The full regexp search is pretty powerful and there is a significant amount of open source code these days.

For Javascript, we looked for a good toolkit which was lightweight but provided some basic goodies, and after some research it came down to mootools vs. jQuery. We went with jQuery since there seemed to be more support and activity around it.

Curious to see what other people think about these various technologies and issues.

Working from everywhere

2008-07-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

We have been working for a little more than a week. We have made some progress but not as much as we would have liked to. I even have a task list of sorts :).

Arvind has been back and forth on some components of our software stack. He already wants us to use 3 programming languages - php, python and Java and I am wondering how I can keep up with all this!

The fun part of last week however is all the different places we have been working from. Sometimes Arvind does not get out of bed to start working... He wakes up, opens his laptop and starts coding!

We are borrowing / stealing (?) office space from Keas. I work better when there are a lot of people and activity around me and the energy level at Keas is high which works really well for me. Thanks Adam!

We also converted one of sitting areas in our loft to office space. We sat there for a day, but I am having all sorts of ergonomic issues with the desk there so I moved to our media room. The couch is comfy and I can see old re-runs of "Sex and the city" while I write php code. Having the TV on, makes me more productive you know ;)

I am trying to get Arvind to post on this blog, so hopefully the next post will be his.

First Day, First Post :)

2008-07-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

Arvind and I (Bindu Reddy) just quit Google to try our hand at our own start-up (We don't even have a name for it yet!!). Today is technically our first day :)). I am personally extremely excited and also slightly nervous. I am excited because we now have time to experiment with what we want to do and hopefully generate value along the way... I am nervous because I am a very social person who talks a lot and sitting in front of a laptop and programming for hours on end is not something I have done for years.....Arvind seems more confident than I am :)

Our first milestone is going to be to, come up with a prototype and invite a small number of users to try out our website/product. I would love for this to happen in 10-12 weeks but I am not sure we can make it happen that quickly. Arvind, being the true engineer, is as usual under-estimating the amount of time and work required and thinks we will get there easily. We will see how it goes...

I am hoping to maintain this blog and record what we do regularly to get advice, feedback and support from anyone who is interested and cares to follow-along. We also want to be able to look back years from now, read this and feel this excitement again!