RailsConf 2008: Friday Late Morning

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