I have been using a hosted Wordpress blog for this site. The annual subscription was due for renewal this October, I thought this might be the right time to get my hands dirty with getting this site on Amazon S3.
The reason for change
Amazon S3 enabled website, S3 is great, cheap (using RRS), can take care of any kind of traffic (never had much anyways) ... feels great to be running a site without worrying about configuring a web server or database!
Wordpress is great, setting up is a breeze, search for a theme, get few plugins, write few posts, great UI ... it's just too straight forward. The whole process of publishing a post needs to be little more fun, there has to be some more geekiness to it and that's where Jekyll fits in very well
Static Site Generator / Tools etc
Started looking at static site generators, thanks to this post - Jekyll was the clear choice. It is being developed actively, bunch of plugins, lots of help available.
Got Ruby, banged my head couple of times on every wall in the room figuring out the dependencies, versions etc. Got rvm, banged my head on the floor - Snow Leopard is 64 bit ... until I read this post ... phew! I am not getting Lion atleast for now
Finally got Jekyll, migrated my Wordpress XML dump, added Markdown, Pygment, Disqus etc
Next picked up Less Framework, clever use of CSS3 media to take care of different screen sizes. Tweaked the default CSS, played with Kuler ... UI / CSS is not something I am good at - tried to rip off things from here and there and got this site up
Wrote a shell script to automate the compression, setup of expiry tags etc when syncing with S3 buckets using s3cmd
CNAME / DNS settings
What I thought would be an overnight process took over 5 days. Updated name servers to net4.in, where I picked up my domain name from. Submitted the CNAME request and it took forever to see the changes reflect. Tired of calling them up and logging tickets - each time the response was some server got stuck or some crap ... Their console to update DNS just does not work.
My weekend project, spilled over into the next week - resulted in the site being down for few days - going forward I will take care of DNS etc upfront
Over the next few weeks, will setup archives, RSS feeds, better integration with twitter and g+
I watched this video few weeks back, never got a chance to write about it - guess what - busy with the new job … being part of the work force ...
“If you don’t design your life, someone else will design it for you and you just might not like their idea of balance.”
I could easily relate to this video, there was a time when I was eating too much, drinking too much and neglecting my family … took a break from corporate life, did nothing for a while, started two companies, took an exit, again took a break … and now back to long hours, drinking and eating.
This video prompted me to think hard of what am I doing and why am I doing? I recommend everybody to watch this talk and try to strike the right work-life balance in your respective lives
The immediate effect of this talk was to force me to think about my priorities in life:
Family - Ada, my daughter
Health
Work 4 days a week for 6hrs a day
Interesting part, the break of two years from workforce, I was unintentionally closer to the above three I have ever been before! Still a long way to go …
I gave my old dell a linux flavor. The whole process was pretty smooth and most of the basic stuff was already pre-installed except for two things where I had to put in an extra effort:
Alternatively you can just take a dump of the ms fonts from windows and upload it to /usr/share/fonts/<new-folder> ... followed by fc-cache -v -f <thanks to @cool_n_curious>
Happened to catch this movie on Star Movies (or was it HBO?) recently - Bill
There is this particular quote in the movie that caught my attention:
Let me tell you something, kid. Working sucks, okay? Working sucks! And it doesn't matter if you're in a bank, a department store or a doughnut factory, because once you've been there long enough, the only thing you'll care about is when your next pay increase is, how many vacation days you've accrued and if your health insurance is gonna pay for the cholesterol medicine that keeps your heart pumping no matter how much shit you've worked through it. Then after you've gained 20 or 30 pounds because you're so fucking uptight all the time, you wake and discover you're working for your father-in-law in a position with a gratuitous title and you're totally replaceable. And not only is the new guy better at your job, but he's got a better car and better jokes and better hair! So not matter what you do, you make sure you make a lot of money doing it because it all sucks! And that is one lesson I, as your mentor, can teach you.
As I am in the process of finalizing whether I should pick up a regular job or not and during compensation discussion one of the point that I brought up was - "when will be the next pay increase" ... sigh!
I am finally wrapping up with my first money making startup this October. This post reflects upon some of the lessons learnt / challenges / issues that I encountered during the past year and half or so
Alignment between founders - Although there were only two of us, but our approach to problems was very different. This can be constructive or destructive and the founder relationship should be mature enough to know when to agree to disagree
Attracting technical talent - Initial months, money was an issue and paying big salaries was not an option ... so it was assumed that once we raise the salary, it would be easier to find people. Now we had the money, it was still difficult to find the right person. I was looking for someone with a min of 3-5years of hands on experience ... If the # of years is more, then the hands on exp goes away, if the # of years is less - the exposure goes down ... in short finding a sr developer was very difficult
In a start-up you first need to define the problem, then find best options to solve the problem and in the process find a sustainable business model. Once our syndication was up and running, defining the problem statement for next piece of work was a challenge - initial customer identification and identifying the minimum viable product. This is where I guess an in-depth knowledge of product is required, if not, the idea is to hire a SME and then start iterating to find the right fit for identified customers
Too much distraction - the whole financial side - payments from US, co-ordination with banks, taxes, audits, payroll, royalties, the ministry of commerce rules and regulations are a big pain in the ass. Investing in the right bank, CA, legal etc is a must - even if they cost more - they end up saving you money by saving your precious time.
What went well?
Knowingly or unknowingly the customer acquisition process for the basic syndication model was executed very well. The reason it went well because my partner had good relationships with the key people at some of the respected / big publication houses. Once you get them on-board, others don't mind giving you a try
For the basic syndication - the competition was limited. How many content aggregators do you know working out of India who would syndicate Indian content?
Building the application to support and automate the aggregation and syndication was technically not that challenging. There was nothing "new" that had to be built. The trick was to choose the right technical stack that could integrate very well with publication feeds. The framework that was built could be customized for every publication or a bunch of publications that followed a standard format (RSS, XML, PDF etc) - it could scale horizontal and vertical
As I look back, I find myself at the same position that I did around 3 years back ... I think the energy, the passion and excitement was lost after couple of months. The application is in place, feeds are coming in and going out ... what next? The only way to grow business from here was to add more content, there was no point in adding more functionalities to the existing app - as it did not matter ... or start something new - where the founders had differences ...
At some point of time, I had to decide whether to continue or not - if after taking a risk, going through the pains of starting a company, there was still something missing and you come back home tired, agitated ... the time had come to let go