Entrepreneurs On Rails – Dan Benjamin
- Successful biz fills a need
- What do you need
- paper work important, expressing the idea idea is better, being flexable on that idea
- energy
- so much you have to do before hand, why are you doing this?
- set goals – we need to do x by y, if we don’t get there we’ll change things
- have a path to cash
- have an exit strategy
- why create a company
- Liability – legal protection from your bugs :)
- Taxes – more buying power, talk to an accountant
- working with other companies
- easy of working with other companies
- Ownership – knowing who gets what
- perception of credibility – but don’t try to be what you are not (cd of office noises for phone calls)
- types of business
- Fictitious Name
- LLC is a good idea
- You don’t have to do this in Delaware
- hire lawyer/accountant
- your website should be very clear about what you wanted
- we build things we need, but if you look at say moms with kids at home you have a much bigger audience
- marketing. peepcode logo (myers: I’ve always thought it looked like a lingerie ad)
- you will spend 40% or more of you time marketing
- making it work is the hard part not the (unknown) paper work
- hard part: adjusting the the lack of stability
- common to be in a feast or famine situation
- co-working is a way to get an office with others
- creativity zone
- biz deals goes like this
- NDA – worth it for a 10k deal to have your lawyer look at it
- proposal – 40 pages shortest he ever did
- contract – you should write the contract, here’s what I’ll do, he’s what I’m liabile and not liabile for
- Functionality Outline – evolution of a statement of work
- getting the money – net 30, net 60, net 15, net 0 – put it in your contract, also “there is a 2% fee for late payments”
- products: it’s about liability
- TOS/privacy policy – be clear, be up front
- ways to get money (see slides)
- on hivelogic he’ll post a sample SOW
Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails
- biggest website at&t runs
- all rails
- 1 year ago 1/2 as big
- (long slides)
- why a big rewrite? – it’s a great bundler
- no automated tests, new features really hard
- lots of code being replace with site redesign
- hard to leverage
- java: get around this web thing with design patterns so you get to the real business of talking to middleware
- devs except that not everything they want will get done
- core team never more that 4 – trying to keep it small
- they looked at django and ejb3/jboss
- no to django
- better automated testing integration (hear hear)
- more platform maturity
- clearer path to C if necessary for performance (I don’t agree with that. Python + C is easy, plus you have psyco and ctype that let you get C performance or use c libs with pure python)
- developer comfort and experience
- not convinced anyone needs MOM
- only one developer that knew rails at the start
- project got stuck
- project lead appointed to make decision-making and communication with executive team, or at least the appearance
- sometimes she decided in private with her bosses
- freeze current site
- if it’s not simple to decide how to change a current site behavior, don’t change it. save it for a later phase.
(it’s worth it to read the slides, even for a non rewrite project. The slides are probably have too much on them, but that’s good for you)
- they spent an amazing amount of time communicating what was changing.
- F5 Load Balancers
- switched to erubis in web tier
May 30, 2008 (5 months, 3 weeks ago) | Tags: railsconf2008
