You likely already know about this amendment. If you do not please read about it and about why it is a bad idea (also the borderline criminal wording this thing will have on the ballot):

http://atlantaunsheltered.com/2010/10/30/georgia-ballot-amendments-suggestions/

http://blog.weatherby.net/2010/10/robo-started-votenoon1.html

http://www.radiantveracity.com/2010/10/ga-vote-no-amendment-one/

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2010/10/01/amendment-one-making-georgia-less-competitive/

http://clatl.com/atlanta/our-pick-for-ballot-measures-yes-to-all-except-amendment-1/Content?oid=2263715

In short this amendment is about noncompete agreements and making them more enforceable in the state of Georgia.

Noncompetes are the tool of incompetent, unqualified, and malicious leaders

I challenge anyone to convince me otherwise.

As an employer, are you worried about investing in the training of a new employee and then losing them to a competitor? Pay them right and treat them well and they will not leave. Are you worried about an employee finding a better way to do what your company does, starting a new company, and bringing you down? Pay them right, treat them well (and listen to their ideas) and they will not leave. Are you worried about competitors poaching your best people? Pay them right and treat them well and they will not leave.

If a company refuses to innovate they deserve to lose their best people and to be brought down by faster moving competitors.

Good leaders and good companies don’t need noncompetes. If an individual wants to foster a sterile, anemic culture and pay low wages they deserve to be alone and out of business and should not have the crutch of a noncompete to lean on.

Join the facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/GAVoteNoOn1
Tell your family and friends.

A Comcast technician finally came out to investigate why our 1 week old cable internet was so flaky. On a side note they concluded it was because of “all the statics” I had configured in the router. I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about (I had no custom settings other than a DMZ host) but when he left our speed was back up so whatever. He swapped a chunk of coax and reset the router to factory settings and I am inclined to crediting those actions for the fix instead.

In any case, when he arrived at our office (with 2 technicians in training behind him) they saw the following at 2pm:

• Lights off except for display glow and some sunlight along one wall
• Hudson dots projected across a wall
• Piles of pizza boxes, cookies, and chip bags
• Beer and red bull being consumed by everybody (have to modulate the effects you see)
• Piles of wire, our custom ducts into the ceiling grid, etc.

They just stood there completely frozen for several seconds until I stood up, turned the lights on, and greeted them. I have to imagine that isn’t typically the environment they walk into

I think our office has a cool, bona fide startup vibe and we get a lot of host incubator tour stops at our door because it generally looks like stuff is getting done.

Over the last year the number of customers, the amount of revenue, and the degree of stability (both financially and technically) has increased dramatically. It is a completely different company than 12 months ago with serious traction. My role in that progression was in my opinion minor and I chalk the success up to the absolutely stellar team that makes the company run now. I could not be more satisfied or proud of what has been accomplished and could not be happier or more complementary about the team that has gathered around it.

Those facts make it difficult and potentially confusing to mention my decision to step way from an active role in the company. I will still be involved as an adviser, supporter, and proud evangelist but will no longer be actively contributing to the technical development or operations of the company. This change is being made slowly over the next month or two to ensure the transition is smooth and I genuinely believe the company is going to be a great example of success for Atlanta.

What is next for me?

I am joining another startup in Atlanta working on an utterly different product. The founders consist of guys I worked with for years in the undergraduate computer labs at Georgia Tech and the technology is around areas I am very passionate about – those that I was focused on as a student before jumping at a chance to help take WTC off the ground as an early engineer. This opportunity combined with the strides made in the last year to put WTC in a stable, growing position are the reasons for this decision.

Needless to say 2010 should be interesting, I am looking forward to it. I’ll be trying to keep this blog a bit more active as well. I had a few posts in 2009 that really took off and hope to give it more attention in 2010.

Here are a few questions for vetting firms with the goal of purging the truly unqualified ones. These questions are based on actual experiences where the lack of understanding was so complete that I felt embarrassed for them. They can come in handy when looking for a firm to assist with some work.

Filtering the Worst

In what country is your coding done?

Generally I want to hear USA (point being – same country I am in). There are exceptions and I don’t want to get into my broader feelings on offshoring but that is what I need to hear.

What is DNS? Have you ever updated a DNS record?

Don’t care at all about getting a technically correct explanation here. I just want to get a feeling that they understand domains don’t magically point at the right place and that they could handle making simple adjustments when I don’t control the domain.

Using only notepad, textedit, or similar, write a page that has the following:

• a green div
• a button underneath that div
• some Javascript that toggles the green div from visible to not visible when the button is clicked

You would likely be amazed at how many agencies this would blow the minds of.

Do you know the difference between GET and POST? When would you generally use each of those?

Want to find general understanding here. Not concerned about a complete, technically correct answer but just want to hear vague familiarity.

Do you know what SSH, SCP, or SFTP are?

Them being familiar at all with just one of these is sufficient. A similar question is how would you get files on a server without FTP?

What are steps you could take to speed up the load time of a page?

At a minimum, hoping for an understanding that reducing the size of pictures/images helps. Beyond that mentions of caching, combining/compressing Javascript, not using every Javascript framework in existence, content distribution networks, or whatever else are icing on the cake.

What is the difference between server side and client side code? What would you personally prefer for each?

Basic blocks here but there are firms with paying customers that could not answer this question well.

Follow Up Questions

Only if the above completely trivial questions can be answered with some confidence should you consider asking follow up questions. Some ideas:

• How do you structure your code/css?
• What do you use for version control?
• Let me see some stuff you have worked on.
• What libraries do you commonly use?

I am not kidding when I say that I know of professional agencies that cannot answer a single question from that first set satisfactorily. Don’t assume the basics. You have to start from nothing when considering a web dev firm or else you might find yourself in a painful situation down the road. There are some excellent firms out there that can really get good work done so don’t take this as a blanket statement covering them all. It is just fair warning that you have to be careful when looking for someone to work on your stuff.

Things Have Changed Fast

The wild part to me is the speed with which this has happened. I helped start my current company ~3 years ago (wow that feels like a long time). We moved into our first office about 6 months after starting. At first it was two of us on our personal laptops working on the borrowed desks of a local consultancy that was helping build version 1 of the software. When we moved into our own office, I built a machine from parts and setup Exchange and that was the start of our “corporate IT”. Production was served up by leased servers colocated at a hosting facility through a reseller. Putting things in the cloud wasn’t an option at all.

We’ve changed the infrastructure a lot (want to blog more about the things tried, what has worked best, and the current setup – possibly at the company blog if not here) but it has always been services installed and hosted on servers I setup. We have a good bit of hardware now so I don’t see us going 100% AWS or similar, but am starting to feel like exploring more what can be pushed off our gear is a priority. We use google docs a lot as a company but could be doing a lot more.

Tomorrow’s Startups

My main point in this ramble is simply to state that if I was starting a new company today, it would make complete sense to put almost everything in the cloud. My paranoid personality would probably cause a server to be in place for a fast, local file share and backup for data/files in the cloud but most storage, production, qa, source control, documents, corporate email, etc could be pushed off to whatever cloud players makes the most sense (weighing more management/oversight/support with cost and staff skills/time). It made sense for IT items some time ago but now makes just as must sense for products and production.

It makes me want to hack on something on the side that goes out of its way to leverage the cloud just so I can force myself to get more familiar with it. Also, Cloud Camp Atlanta sounds cool.

The rounds of voting on the various pitches went on forever but finally concluded with Mark’s “Mark’s Horrible Idea” (have not yet selected a new name) finishing in the top 5. There ended up being a pack of us in the group and though it started out (I think) as a joke I honestly found it to be the most desirable thing to work on for the weekend. There are several reasons for this:

• Due to the new format, I see it being less likely that something sticks beyond this weekend that doesn’t involve nontrivial commitment from all group members in the future. However, it is great that the new format allows this range and gives each participant different options of idea/length/scope to choose from.
• Continuing the previous point, I already have a job at a startup that pulls a lot of my time and attention. My goal with startup weekend was not to pick up another job.
• Mark’s Horrible Idea actually isn’t that horrible, has some interesting possible uses, and involves some fun API usage and integration. We’ve refined it from what was initially pitched.
• I wanted to work on something cool that was a weekend worth of work.
• Chance to work with smart people and learn some new stuff.

The tech selected is Ruby/Rails/jQuery so I feel less able to contribute immediately to the core bits but am confident i’ll have no problem picking up whatever is needed to work on my pieces. Nothing helps me learn faster than having a reason and/or deadline.

The only potential regret is our group is all developers meaning the broader pool for all of the concepts to staff from are missing out on what I believe to be 6-7 of the stronger developers in attendance. We had 2 groups bust into our initial brainstorming meeting trying to recruit some of us away. I believe in the end we’ll be one of the only groups with something that actually functions and we’ll probably have more fun.

Contemplating bringing a cooler for the group tomorrow, once the top layer of public beer was gone all that remained was bud light and pbr and that’s a tough situation.

It is the people that attend that make it worthwhile, its amazing how 100+ smart, interesting people just show up, setup sessions, and start learning/sharing/drinking/coding. Some other factors that contributed to the success:

• ATDC. The location for Barcamp is pretty much perfect. The layout of that floor is absolutely ideal for what Barcamp is and it truly is great for ATDC to loan out that space for a weekend. They even had extra security there all night which was a good idea considering the density of Macbooks, phones, etc there.
• The layout of the center room with the round tables was fantastic and far more conducive to conversation than the rows of chairs last year. I would strongly vote for having this layout again next time. It also made that center room work for smaller round-table discussion sessions as well.
• I think having the first night dinner inside (in the room with round tables) worked out really well. Last year at the top of the deck it was windy, there weren’t places to sit, and it was hard to talk to people.
• All of the other sponsors – wow there was a lot of food, soda, and beer. BBQ for dinner, Flying Biscuit for Saturday breakfast, and great pizza for lunch and the food-to-person ratio was huge at each.

The only negative is I leave with a dozen things I want to look into with more detail. I especially want to start playing with Erlang now but must wait as I feel that I need to build up more Ruby knowledge before Startup Weekend 2. By the way, there was a session at Barcamp on Startup Weekend 2 and its a bit different than last year but sounds like it will be a lot of fun.

I remember last year a big production bug came up around 11pm and I spent the 11pm – 6am hours fixing it but even with that it was a good time.

My goal now is to figure out something more interesting for a session this time around. Tried to do PostgreSQL tuning/admin last time and had all of 2 or 3 people show up for any portion. Perhaps something on Scala, am becoming a pretty huge fan of that language.

I personally wasn’t thrilled with my pitch but I suppose my pitching skills can be expected to have degraded after a year or so of heads down cranking instead of pitching. I stumbled twice due to tweaking the script and order of things right up until my slot and I somehow managed to run long despite my tendency to speak quickly in front of crowds and had to cut the last slide, the most important one, short.

In any case it was definitely worth attending. I thought the atmosphere was fantastic, the venue was ideal, and everyone was just there to talk, share, and connect. I didn’t get pitched by anyone but startups (no vendors, service providers, recruiters, or similar) which really was great and I think it changed the whole feel of the event. No dealing with high school girls peddling hosting plans they know nothing about as I have endured elsewhere.

Major props to Sanjay Parekh for putting it all together. The after party turned out wonderful as well. The rooftop deck (and office in general) of Nelson Mullins was pretty sick. Though I would have preferred to have a stout or porter to choose from there is absolutely nothing real to complain about.

Hopefully by the time the next one rolls around we’ll be able to assist as a sponsor.