Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Sonali and I have been working a project to make a light weight and hosted project management tool. We’re calling it SCMPLE and yesterday was our first pitch. You can checkout Our Slides.

For those that don’t know, Startup Riot gives startups like ours a forum to present and connect with like minded individuals. We’re barely out of the idea stage, but we still had a bunch of people come up and talk to us about our idea. Which rocked, because we were the second up and I wasn’t all that awake yet.

There wasn’t very much that didn’t rock about the event. Given that we’re pitching a Git based idea, I would have preferred to have not immediately followed the keynote by Chris Wanswrath of GitHub fame. He gave a great talk, has a very cool product, and is a super nice guy, so it’s hard to be upset about that. The overall message of “do what you’re passionate about” resonated strongly within the audience.

The pitches were surprisingly interesting. You’d think that watching 17 or so companies present in a row would get boring or repetitive, but neither happened. Even the bad pitches or unreadable slides were worthwhile because of the Backnoise, though it did go a little overboard.

The only real downside of StartupRiot is that I’ve had to switch to TweetDeck. Just met enough new folks to break the camel’s back with Hahlo.

As a presenter, I’ve got to thank Sanjay Parekh, not just for the main event, but all the free advice and help in getting ready for it. It was my first pitch out to an audience that didn’t know exactly what I was talking about. I also need to thank Scott Burkett and Jeff McConnell, who both gave some great guidance during the practice session.

Also as a presenter, I wouldn’t mind paying to present. The fees for StartupRiot really are nominal, given the value I obtained for it. If there is anything that will keep the event going, I’m all for it.

These are my pretty random thoughts relating to Atlanta Startup Weekend2.

I like the multi-idea format.  It kept people engaged and happy.  A lot of folks felt the idea selection phase took to long.  I was an early supporter of this idea.  However, in retrospect, it might not have been a bad thing. 

Based on the ideas posted to the website, I went into Friday night planning on helping out with Giving Time or the project called Seed Stage Records.  By the end of the night, I really wanted to work on “Mark’s Horrible Idea” or “Get Me A Date.”  Hearing the pitches, it became clear that a lot of the ideas weren’t well thought out or appropriately researched.  This made me uncomfortable, since there really isn’t much time.  The ideas that were better seemed to draw incredibly huge teams.  This is also disconcerting, since you’re likely to spend more time arguing than actually doing things.  

“Mark’s Horrible Idea” and “Get Me A Date” were incredibly appealing, simply because they were quirky, morally questionable, and pitched as jokes.  Which meant they felt nothing at all like a day job.  I’ve already got one of those, along with a bunch of side projects.  I came to ASW2 to have fun, and these were the projects that seemed the most fun to work on.

I pretty much ended up as the front person for “Mark’s Horrible Idea” (rebranded Reepli.com.  This taught me some really important lessons. 

Teams are crucial

We were able to accomplish what we did because all of us had worked together in the past. This made it possible to check our egos at the door and focus on who would be best doing what. The project was originally “Mark’s Horrible Idea” but I ended up taking on the biz dev and marketing duties. That happens a lot in the real world. What doesn’t happen a lot is that transition occurred without any real conflict or founder’s anxiety. Structuring the team that way just made the most sense.

Having a good team that understands each other and knows how to make each member useful is crucial to getting something done in a short amount of time.

Context Switching is Hard

I’m not a biz-dev person, I just played one at ASW. Something I find incredibly hard and will work on more in the future is switching between coder and something else. When you’re programming and deep into the problem, it’s important to switch gears and focus on the points that are relevant to your audience. They probably don’t care that you use Capistrano. They probably do care what problem you solve and how you intend to make money.

Also, as the de-facto team lead, a lot of what I needed to do was make sure everyone was being productive and knew their importance to the goal. However, as a programmer, my desire was to stick my headphones on and jump head first into the code. Finding the right balance isn’t easy.

Beware mock data

More often than not, this ends up on a projector in a room full of people. Thankfully, everyone found it funny and nobody was offended.

Credits

I’d once again like to thank everyone for their hard work and point out their key contributions (in no particular order).

• Amro Mousa did some front-end and worked extensively on the search components
• Hamed Hashemi built search and reply modules and assisted with all the server work
• Mark Luffel pitched the idea that made us laugh. He also built a lot of the front-end and tossed in a most of the AJAX
• Erik Peterson our resident rails uber-guru built a ton of the backend and wrote the unit tests. We had nearly 75% of our code covered thanks to him
• Joe Uhl wrote the reply transformation module, before his real startup called and he had to leave us for the weekend

Thanks guys!

Also, thanks to Lance Weatherby and the ATDC who made it all possible.

First off, hats off to Micheal Mealing, Lance Weatherby, the ATDC, and everyone else who helped to put this event together.  It takes a lot of work to put something like this together and they deserve another round of applause.

This year’s sessions were on par with last years for interest.  I think there were more rooms open on the first night, which made it even harder to figure out where to go. I hate throwing technology at everything, but I support the idea that there should be a computerized system to track this stuff. However, there was one noticeable difference.  Barcamp Atlanta 2 had a real lack of business and hard-science focused sessions.  It was mostly tech and new media.  I know some business people who didn’t make it, and many of the ones that did stuck with technical topics.  On the other hand, this year featured a session on beat boxing, and all the Saturday morning sessions featured a drunk guy passed out in the corner.  We didn’t get that last year.

The sessions I presented were not terrible, which is acceptable since I did little to prepare.  I got smacked down on my presentation for SCMPLE (hey its’ the first time I’ve pitched).  I demoed Fluid, which was fun because I got to kick all the Windows users out.  Plus, I think I got a convert from Twhril to Hahlo, so my work was done.

The other side of Barcamp are all the mini-impromptu sessions that happen outside in the halls.  It’s one of the few opportunities where you get to hang out with that many of your fellow technologists.  This makes one thing very clear: there are a lot of very talented and passionate people in this town. This is contrary to what some former local celebrities would have you believe.  Almost everyone that wasn’t involved with a startup or small company full time is actively trying to build one on the side.  There are also some innovative solutions out there that are really only possible in a place like Atlanta.  Josh Sweeny’s AltInvest is a great example of someone trying to tackle the problem of early stage in a different way.

Barcamp Atlanta 2 was a success and in the halls you already heard the chief organizers starting to plan the 3rd.  Until then, we’ve got Startup Weekend, Startup Riot, and a plethora of weekly meet-ups to keep us busy.  See you there!

For some reason, PostgreSQL is sorta a pain to get working on the Mac. Much of this is that the ports version does bizarre things, such as make all the directories you expect to have end with the Postgres version number. Once you install it, you have to go symlink a bunch of things just to make it work sensibly. To top it off, the way ports (used to, maybe not now) adds the Postgres user makes it so that it shows up on the login screen. The Mysql installs don’t do that. It’s odd to me that a database that’s some weird conglomeration of Oracle and Sun is easier to get up and running, but it’s true and annoying.

Apparently, my brainwaves have been radiating that annoyance somewhat strongly, and was picked up by a developer who appears to live right here in Atlanta. Andy Satori is maintaining PostgreSQL binary installers for mac. He’s also built a few lightweight gui tools to use along with Postgres, including a pretty decent Cocoa query tool:

Installing the package was easy and there’s no Postgres user on my login screen. Double win. If you want Postgres on your mac, this is definitely the way to go.

Making my Postgres filled evening even better, I didn’t even have to go through a series of elaborate contortions to get my gem to build. gem install postgres was all I needed.

To round out the Postgres post, check out this visualization on the PostgreSQL project commit history.