My Own Pirate Radio

One of the big challenges in running a small software startup is service availability and support. This was, perhaps, a little easier in the bad old days when software shipped in boxes and "support" meant picking up a phone between 9-5 on business days, then mailing out a CD or floppy disc (remember those?) with updated bits. Nowadays, much of the software people are building "ships" as a service running 24×7 on the web, or at least has a online service component to it. What’s more, customers increasingly reside around the world, and expect near-realtime responses, especially if their business depends on your software service. You can imagine, then, that for a 1- or 2-person dev shop, making a web service highly available to customers is a particularly daunting challenge.

There are "business" solutions you can use, including limiting your support service level agreement and hiring more support people, perhaps in different time zones around the world. These may be appropriate depending on your customer needs and your budget.

You can also throw technology at it. Here’s what we are trying to do in that vein, on 5 Blocks Out:

(1) Ship quality software. This is motherhood and apple pie, but bears repeating. Lots of software companies still imagine they can somehow cut costs by shipping half-baked code. Sorry, it doesn’t work. If you don’t invest in writing good code in the first place, you will pay orders of magnitude more for it later in support costs and frustrated customers. The only valid exception I can think of is prototype code.

I feel like we have lots more to do here, but for small fry we’re doing well thus far. We try to be thoughtful and minimalist about what we build in the first place. Then, if it gets built, it gets tested. Rails’ built-in testing facilities and various plugins like test/spec help a great deal. Capistrano (for automated deployment and rollback) and Firebug have also proven to be vital. Next on the list is eycap.

(2) Outsource work to a Web Host. For a software startup, the question is not whether to do this, but with whom. Outsourcing the heavy lifting of buying/building and maintaining server farms, managing network bandwidth, and handling some of the basic application-level services is a no-brainer. Pay as you go, and use the time saved to focus on your core competencies. If and when your businesses gets big enough, you can always pull some of the strategic responsibilities in-house.

We currently use Hosting Rails. Generally speaking, their servers run well and their rates are reasonable. I have run into reliability problems lately, though, and despite responsive support it is becoming time to consider other hosters. Slicehost, 3Tera, and the increasingly fashionable Amazon S3 are on the "must review" list. I’ve also taken a brief look at Google App Engine, and concluded its platform is too high-level for our needs.

(3) Automate monitoring. Automated watchdogs can stay up 24×7. You, my friend, cannot. Put down the Red Bull and get yourself a suite of automated watchdogs to monitor your software’s health.

We’re getting going on this now. For starters, the Exception Notification plugin has proven itself mighty useful for after-the-fact diagnosis and debugging of Rails apps. If you’re running a Rails app, I highly recommend this plugin.

Next, you need some 3rd party ping action. Troy tells me Alertra is also supposed to be a good quality monitoring service. We are currently trying out Pingdom. The idea behind these services is to hit your site every minute (or 5 minutes, or 15… you decide) from a series of servers around the world, and let you know whether and how quickly your service is responding to HTTP, pings, and so on. When something goes wrong you get notified by email and/or SMS text message. Pingdom also collects and aggregates the data so you can look at reports over time.

Happily, Pingdom has already paid for itself: immediately after turning it on I found our service was bouncing daily (well, middle-of-nightly), sometimes down for many minutes at a time. HostingRails gave us a month of additional free hosting as compensation, and promised to watch the server more closely. We’ve had zero downtime since then. 

Going a level deeper is also essential: you need realtime monitoring built into the service itself, so that you can detect and resolve problems when their symptoms first surface, or even before then. Monit, God, and Munin are on my "must review" list for this sort of thing.

I’d love to hear back on other tools and tactics startup developers are using to build and run high-availability software services. Without losing sleep, that is.

Happy zzz….

I promised a few weeks back to join Katrin on the Mukodu Blog. This is my first Mukodu post, co-authored with Katrin, and cross-posted on MyOwnPirateRadio. Sorry, no pictures. :-)

People have been asking what we’re up to with Mukodu. While we can’t talk in detail yet on the specifics of what we’re doing, we are ready to share with you our vision, our motivation, and the company culture we intend to build.

Over the past ten years Katrin and I have lived in two countries, three different cities, and five different homes. We’ve also had the good fortune of travelling broadly. In doing so, we’ve recognized a common challenge: more and more people live in and move between urban areas, where they seek new opportunities, new friendships, and increased quality of life. Yet newcomers often don’t know where to begin, or how to get connected in a city, despite being surrounded by people. At the same time, "old-timers" often get so caught up in the routine of daily life — working, commuting, connecting with friends and family — that they fall out of touch with the changes going on around them, and with the people and resources right outside their front doors. It’s a great irony: despite living in populous, thriving, dynamic cities, we are so often disconnected. Thus the inspiration for the Mukodu blog, and for our first product, 5 Blocks Out.

5 Blocks Out is about connecting people with local life and culture. If you’re new to an area and trying to figure out which neighbourhood to call home, 5 Blocks Out will help you. If you want to learn what’s happening in the nooks and crannies of the city around you, 5 Blocks Out will keep you informed and up to date. If you want to hear what real people like you have to say about local places, events, and issues, 5 Blocks Out will help you to tap into urban word of mouth. And if you’re interested in helping others find “nearby good stuff”, thereby supporting local communities (yay!) and reducing environmental footprint (yay!), 5 Blocks Out plans to help you there too. 

Why work on a challenge like this? Because we love the places we’ve lived, and the friendships we’ve made there, and we want more of the same for everyone. We believe cities whose people engage in neighbourhood life, local culture, and civic discourse have unlimited potential as places to live. We believe healthy connections between people within neighbourhoods are essential. We believe the collective voice and wisdom of a city’s inhabitants is more interesting and, indeed, more personally relevant, than the voice of popular media. And so we’re setting out to create a community powered by the people, for the people, with the goal of making cities great places to live.

Mukodu is just getting going: for roughly the past year it’s been Katrin and myself, working together in true startup fashion: 25 hour days, 8 days a week, 1 to 2 minor miracles per day. We’re learning how to bootstrap a business on a shoestring, design and build products together, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. We’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing, debating strategy, and thinking through minute design and implementation details. We’ve learned a lot, and built the beginnings of something we think you’ll love. It’s been thrilling, and terrifying, and the most fun we’ve ever had "working". We count ourselves very fortunate to be doing something we’re passionate about, day in and day out. We owe huge thanks to all of you who have supported us thus far.

Mukodu is also growing, and we’re looking forward to growing further. We’ve recently had a great boost with part-time help from Katy, Aaron, and Troy. We’re plugged in to a wonderful community and office space at the Centre for Social Innovation. And we’re starting to bring on some trusted advisors to kick the tires on our product and provide more guidance as we near public release.

While we aren’t in a position to hire people yet, we soon hope to be. We’ll need help: in particular, more software engineering and operations talent to build and run a kick-ass software service; advisors and board members to guide us; and angels to help prime the pump. We’re looking for these folks, starting now. We want people who share our values, passion, and hunger to change the world. We want people who are smart, scrappy, and get things done. We want people with creativity and a love for data analysis and problem-solving. We want people who understand that "going live on the web" is just the beginning; we must also have the humility to continually seek feedback and iteratively build something that actually works for customers and solves their needs. We want people who can handle the uncertainty and risk inherent in a startup environment, and whose instinctive response to a challenge is, "Can do!". If that sounds like you, or someone you know, let’s talk. 

We’re excited. We are getting great feedback. And with your help, we will make a real change.

Fire it up!

Osh and Katrin

Hi all, I have some exciting news to share.

Some of you know that Katrin and I have been collaborating on putting together a web startup. We are extending the core idea she’s been blogging about on Mukodu: namely, discovering local “good stuff” by tapping into the knowledge of your friends and neighours. So… [drum roll]… moving forward, we will both be blogging about our brand new startup — Mukodu, Inc. — and the projects we’re working on together under that umbrella.

Don’t worry, I promise to keep on writing obscure, geeky, niche stuff here on MyOwnPirateRadio, just like I always have. I don’t want the readership numbers to dip into single digits, after all. But from time to time I will also post on the Mukodu Blog, especially when it’s a topic of general interest regarding our startup work.

The first project we’re working on is called “5 Blocks Out”. The web site is currently under development, and all going well, we’ll begin opening it up for public trial later this summer. If you’d like an invitation to participate in the Beta release, visit www.5BlocksOut.com, drop us your email via the signup form, and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for you to kick the tires.

In the meantime, stay tuned to Mukodu for more!

Osh

If you’re working at home, I strongly encourage you to think about a shared or "co-working" arrangement for at least part of your week.

I am bumping into a lot more people these days who are working at home or considering it. Perhaps it’s just coincidence, or maybe the people I hang out with are hitting some magic age where career change is necessary. Perhaps more of us will begin work-shifting, in addition to time-shifting?

Personally, I’ve worked from home for the last few years, with about half of that time spent jointly on a project with Katrin. It’s been fun: we get to structure our work space and work day just the way we like it, and there is a subtle luxury in the freedom to opt into "weekend activities" on weekdays. But it can also be challenging: you can get stir-crazy, lonely, burnt out due to lack of working schedule boundaries, or unproductive due to distractions. After experiencing a taste of all these things, we recently decided to rent out some part-time office space at the Centre for Social Innovation, and have begun splitting time between the two office spaces. So far, so good.

Toronto is lacking coworking options right now. Indoor Playground ran for about a year and a half and closed up shop around the end of 2007 when their landlord hiked the rents. Centre for Social Innovation offers workspace rentable by the hour or by the month, with shared access to networking, printing, a kitchen, and so on. But as their name suggests and David Crow points out, CSI’s focus is on social innovation, and they require all tenants to have that as part of their agenda.

Wayne Lee posted on TorCamp this morning about organizing a meeting to gauge interest in creating a new Toronto coworking space. Check it out:

We’re trying to gauge interest in developing a permanent dedicated coworking space in downtown Toronto. This might include shared office
space, some anchor offices, meeting and training space, and a private cafe. It could be any or all of those. Let’s have a discussion with a brief presentation to explore what it might be and why you might want to be a part of this.

Where: Epicure Cafe, 2nd fl, 502 Queen St W, between Spadina and Bathurst

When: Tue May 27, 7:00-8:30pm

Please register at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/116040079

On the more casual end of the spectrum, there are lots of cafes that tolerate laptop customers for a while, but I haven’t yet found any other than the Linux Caffe on Harbord street in Little Italy that actively encourage mobile workers. It’s an odd contrast to Seattle and San Francisco, where mobile working is de rigeur, and it’s easy to find hangout spots where you can be productive and — shock! — welcome for a few hours.

Here’s hoping the coworking trend will tick upwards in Toronto too.

A friend asked me the other day, what does "Beta" mean in the software industry?

I wasn’t really sure what to answer at first. "Beta" used to mean an interim test phase on the way to a "final" and "supported" product release. But over the last five years or so, as we’ve shifted from the boxed-product software world to the online service software world, the term has taken on a very different meaning.

Here’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to say about it in a recent Business Week interview:

How do you make sure all these Google engineering projects actually turn into useful services?

The No. 1 thing we do require is: You can do whatever you want as long as you track it. We have very sophisticated measurement systems at every stage of launch. We have what is called trusted testers. Then beta test, which is forever. We do these 1% launches where we float something out and measure that. We can dice and slice in any way you can possibly fathom.

No real support guarantee, although I doubt . He should know. Pretty much every Google offering has a Beta label on it, with the notable exception of Web search.

So… the new "Beta" means continuous testing, measurement, and improvement. The product is never really "finished", per se… it just evolves. As for support and product quality expectations, it’s much harder these days to get explicit statements or promises from vendors on that sort of thing. Thus "Beta" is also a convenient marketing label to hide behind –  just like it always has been — except that now you can hide forever. (That said, if a so-called Beta service like Gmail went down, you can bet the support would be fast and furious.)

The last point in Schmidt’s answer is also interesting, and to the point on how Google decides whether a service is actually successful:

What’s more important than the absolute number is the relative growth rate. High growth solves virtually all problems. If the growth rate is low, or negative, you’ve got a serious problem.

Test, measure, improve.

Rogers announced this morning that they finally struck a deal with Apple to support the iPhone in Canada.

We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

So the big questions now are (1) when?, (2) how much?, and (3) which versions of the phone will be supported first (Apple is releasing a new one soon, and many people have brought hacked v1 iPhones from the US to Canada over the last year).

Should be an interesting iPhone vs Blackberry showdown.

Mike Zintel just published a great blog post on Mesh, the project he’s been working on at Microsoft the last few years with Dave Treadwell. Now I know why they couldn’t tell me anything about work, other than cryptic stuff like, "It’s going to be cool," and, "it’s pretty hectic", and "I’ll buy you lunch".

I’ve only read a little on it. I like what I see so far. Pub/sub is great, and anything that makes synch better is good. The key will be to make it truly cross-platform and not too exclusively tied to the cruddy stuff that old-guard Microsoft loves to push: Live IDs (remember Passport, anyone?), Windows, and .NET. Lip service to cross-platform won’t cut it.

In any case, this is going to stir up some much-needed excitement in the MS development community. The PDC this year will surely rock.

I wonder how long until we see the first Mesh iPhone app?

Congratulations to the Mesh team.

P.S. I’d like to take it for a spin, but I decided it’ll have to wait. I lost interest and ran out of time somewhere around 10 minutes into the registration process. Let me guess: nobody on the team has actually tried public signup? It’s a nightmare. To begin with you need a Live ID, which means signing up to MSN, which no developer in their right mind wants to do. (And when will "Live" replace MSN? Sigh.) Then you get hit with the "Please join our waiting list" Mesh page. Then you get dumped on the Microsoft Connection Directory page, whatever the heck that is. No thanks. I need a nap.

Guess I’ll wait for the open beta.