Sean Mountcastle

As Chad Fowler says, “The best reason to learn a new programming language is to learn to think differently.” Here in Northern VA, we have a new opportunity to think differently with the introduction of the NoVA Languages group. Chris Williams from Iterative Designs posted to the NoVA RUG mailing list this morning and received quite a bit of interest. Here’s what he has to say about the new group:

Thoughts on the makeup of the group include obtaining (however you want) a book, working through the book 1 chapter per week on one night of that week with a group of like minded individuals.

To start, the group will work through Joe Armstrong’s Programming Erlang book starting on Monday, June 16th (hopefully I’ll be able to work out a schedule with my wife so I can attend). This is an excellent choice on several levels: every developer should know a functional programming language; single core processors are increasingly rare and the number of cores in commodity hardware should only increase in the coming years; and I already own the book.

If Erlang doesn’t pique your interest, the NSCoderNight DC group is going to work through the 3rd Edition of Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book on Tuesday nights. For several months now, I’ve been playing around with Cocoa and while I’m getting used to the syntax of Objective-C, the XCode IDE and Interface Builder still seem foreign to me (I never liked IDEs having been weened on Emacs).

It’s a great time to be a programmer in Northern Virginia!

Update: It turns out that there’s another Cocoa group right around the corner from me in Reston: CocoaHeads. They meet the second Thursday of each month.

Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a special Refresh DC meeting on the challenges of starting your own business. The format was a panel of folks from the DC startup scene moderated by Jackson Wilkinson of Viget Labs. The panel consisted of Brian Williams of Viget Labs, Andrew Lee of Publi.us, Eric Rupert from Odeo, Eddie Frederick of Hungry Machine, and Sean Greene of LaunchBox Digital.

These were the main points I took away:

1. Be passionate. The most important quality for startup founders is to be passionate about their product or service. Starting a company can be exhilarating but the setbacks can be really difficult. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing each of these roadblocks will be an excuse for you to quit. Figure out what you’re passionate about and work on that.
2. Focus on your product. Don’t focus on the pie-in-the-sky potential valuations of your company or worry about leasing office space, hiring an attorney, finding an accountant, etc. Instead you should focus on the product or service you’re going to sell. Get something out there quickly — pick the most important feature and get it out there in front of your customers quickly.
3. Have your customers influence your product. If you follow the previous advice and get your product out there quickly you can use customer feedback to iterate your product. You may not know all of the difference ways customers will use your product, so this feedback is critical in charting your product roadmap.
4. Equity is control, don’t surrender it easily. One of the attendees asked about using equity to pay for services if money was tight. Brian said to avoid giving out equity as you make that person a partner in your business. While they may not have a controlling interest, they are still an owner and have some influence.
5. Don’t overfund. All of the panelists warned of the dangers of taking too much money as it does more than dilute the founders’ ownership. Venture capitalists are looking to make a large return o their capital for themselves and their limited partners. If you need to pay a vendor or contractor find another way — defer payment, use credit, etc.
6. Hire slow, fire fast. Early employees can make or break your company. You will be working long hours aside these folks so you must ensure they’re a good fit. If you make a bad hire, you need to resolve the situation quickly, don’t let emotion get in the way.

Some of the books recommended were: Art of the Start, Getting to Yes, and Founders at Work. Andrew also recommended Startup School run by Y Combinator (YC). I’ve been reading Paul Graham’s essays for around seven years now and following YC’s investments. I’m glad to see an early stage investor like YC in the DC area (LaunchBox Digital) and hope that the startup scene in DC and suburbs becomes more vibrant.

Thanks to Strategic Analysis for hosting this. It was a great venue and hope they’ll offer to host Refresh DC again.

Recently at work I spent a few weeks tuning a network service across three platforms (Solaris, Linux, and AIX) to get within 10% of the theoretical maximum throughput. In this short article, I’ll walk through the various tools I used to improve the performance of the application.

This application is very specialized in that the two machines are connected directly through an ethernet switch. This means that the MTU could easily be determined from each end of the link and the extra work to determine the maximum segment size for the transit network (see RFC 1191) was unnecessary. This also made it very easy to watch the traffic between the two hosts as well as the system calls they were using to transfer and receive the data.

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Almost a year ago, I submitted three recipes to Advanced Rails Recipes. Unfortunately, one which was originally selected back in June has been dropped from the book as it’s not really advanced. So I thought I’d post it here for everyone to enjoy.

Using AJAX with REST

Problem:

You have finally mastered REST (Representational State Transfer) and wish to enhance your application with JavaScript but don’t know which of the resource URLs to call.

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Tonight I was able to attend NSCoderNight DC in Tysons Corner, VA and finally met Jose Vazquez in person. Unfortunately, turn out is pretty spotty, with Jose being the only continuous attendee. Despite it being just the two of us, I came away energized and started playing around with the new APIs we spoke about: Core Audio/AudioQueues and Quartz Composer.

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Whether you realize it or not, there are several companies gathering a tremendous amount of data about you. One such company is Acxiom which maintains consumer information on nearly every household in the U.S. (and has branched out to other countries). Acxiom combines tax records and public census data with transactional data from its clients (the corporations you deal with on a daily basis). Using this data, Acxiom has created a product called PersonicX which is a finely-grained household level segmentation system based on consumer and demographic characteristics.

The idea of such a classification system both interests and appalls me quite a bit, so I’ve done some research into the 70 segments and 21 life-stage groups.

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