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Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

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Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#21

Post by jacquesm »

gruseom wrote: post #16
d_r wrote: post #12

"But if you say you’re booked solid with your children and yet you still find time to watch television and play online poker, then it is time to have a frank discussion about your true priorities in life." Besides the very honest and insightful write-up (thank you!), this last sentence is worth its weight in gold. It's too easy to make excuses for not following your goals and blame something other than your own lack…

I think that sentence is unfair. If you have a job and small children, it's easy to be so exhausted after putting them to bed that there is no energy left to think about anything important. It's true of course that children are the handiest excuse around. But it's also true that once you start down the job-and-family highway it can be exceedingly difficult to get onto an exit. The implication here -- that if you're n…

Another pitfall is to do a start-up while having kids and a family and to let the start-up take precedence while ignoring the needs of your family.

It's pretty common.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#22

Post by cromulent »

ismarc wrote: post #8
patio11 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a lot of credit (perhaps more than I deserve) because I talk a lot, am amicable, and write in a compelling manner. Communication is the great underlooked startup/engineering skill. I prefer taking the opposite tack [+] with regards to simplicity: there is indeed such a thing as simple. Your business, on day one, is simple. It will gradually become more complex as you learn things and learn what the business nee…

I think the idiom is difficult because it's not a properly understood idiom for most people who speak English. It's a sailing term. When you're sailing into the wind, you criss-cross against it, changing the side of the ship the wind is coming across, so the ship ends up taking zig-zag path through the water. Changing the orientation of the ship so the wind comes across a different side is tacking. It's the opposite…

To add a little more, it is often a good tactic in competition. If you take the same tack as your competitor, then you are simply following them in their "dirty wind" and are unlikely to overtake.

If you take the opposite tack, then you may well find clean wind, or better wind, and you may also be able to approach them on starboard tack, forcing them to give way.

Don't follow your competitor - take the opposite tack.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#23

Post by alnayyir »

pvg wrote: post #11
patio11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Sometime after this interview I figured out what my Apache configuration problems were. The short version: KeepAlive, which might as well be called as TurnThisOnToBlockThisServerTotallyEveryTimeYourSiteAppearsInSocialMedia.

There's also just tossing a reverse proxy in front of your apache, it hands the problem of slow requests, bad requests, KeepComatose, etc to something lightweight that's a lot more crap-tolerant. http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html The simpler of these (e.g. pound) take about as much time to set up as scrolling through your apache config looking for some mis-set option.

One task to a machine can save a lot of trouble, ie, not having the database on the local app server + having varnish + nginx in front of it.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#24

Post by patio11 »

tkahn6 wrote: post #10

Patrick, this was really a great read. It wasn't clear to me from the article, but it seems that a lot of the 'syncing' of information between databases and services was programmed by hand by you. How much time did you spend on this and if you had to re-setup your infrastructure, would you go with a service that does most of this for you (if one even exists)?

I did all the programming for BCC. I am not sure what you are specifically referring to with "syncing", but the code to all features discussed in this writeup is only a few hundred lines. Aside from having to put an HTTP client in my Java app it is fairly painless.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#25

Post by alnayyir »

skmurphy wrote: post #20

This was the best exchange in the interview: Q: Can you share the key metrics you watch on a daily basis? Why are they important to you? A: I have published a variety of stats but I don’t watch metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make metrics-based decisions on a daily basis, and absent making decisions watching metrics is only as productive as playing WoW.

I find this doubly amusing because he used to play WoW.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#27

Post by tkahn6 »

patio11 wrote: post #24
tkahn6 wrote: post #10

Patrick, this was really a great read. It wasn't clear to me from the article, but it seems that a lot of the 'syncing' of information between databases and services was programmed by hand by you. How much time did you spend on this and if you had to re-setup your infrastructure, would you go with a service that does most of this for you (if one even exists)?

I did all the programming for BCC. I am not sure what you are specifically referring to with "syncing", but the code to all features discussed in this writeup is only a few hundred lines. Aside from having to put an HTTP client in my Java app it is fairly painless.

I think you answered my question. By syncing I meant that, for instance, when a customer makes a purchase, a whole chain of events unfolds (databases are updated, keys are sent out, analytics packages are updated).

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#28

Post by jacquesm »

patio11 wrote: post #4
troygoode wrote: post #2

Great article and always good to hear more from Patrick. I still find it incredibly humorous that one of the more influential startup stories on HN is a "simple" Bingo Card Creator. Patrick continually shows that there is no such thing as "simple" when you're striving to be successful. Favorite bit from the article: "Prior to running a business I ran a WoW guild. It was rather substantially more work and more drama t…

I get a lot of credit (perhaps more than I deserve) because I talk a lot, am amicable, and write in a compelling manner. Communication is the great underlooked startup/engineering skill. I prefer taking the opposite tack [+] with regards to simplicity: there is indeed such a thing as simple. Your business, on day one, is simple. It will gradually become more complex as you learn things and learn what the business nee…

I think we're all rooting for you because you come across as as a genuinely nice guy and because you live the dream that many here just dream of, to wean yourself from your pay-check and to go 'independent' without any outside help.

It's impressive, to say the least, far more so than many of the 'my feature just got funded' items and if you keep at it you'll do very well in the long run.

Keep an eye on your savings, make sure you plan for rainy days as well, they're inevitable.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#29

Post by loewenskind »

gruseom wrote: post #16
d_r wrote: post #12

"But if you say you’re booked solid with your children and yet you still find time to watch television and play online poker, then it is time to have a frank discussion about your true priorities in life." Besides the very honest and insightful write-up (thank you!), this last sentence is worth its weight in gold. It's too easy to make excuses for not following your goals and blame something other than your own lack…

I think that sentence is unfair. If you have a job and small children, it's easy to be so exhausted after putting them to bed that there is no energy left to think about anything important. It's true of course that children are the handiest excuse around. But it's also true that once you start down the job-and-family highway it can be exceedingly difficult to get onto an exit. The implication here -- that if you're n…

Agreed. And what's more, marriage and raising a child both take a lot of time. I often don't even open my laptop at home because I just don't have the time.

Personally, I realized that (a) I can't live with the idea of working at a big corp until I retire and (b) if I wish to remain married and connect with my kids (you only have 10 years!) I don't have the time to do this on the side. Given those two truths I decided to lock in our expenses (i.e. making more money doesn't help my goal if we just spend it) and switch to consulting. As a consultant I make enough that I can periodically take 6 months off to give my start up ideas another go. If the business gets some traction then maybe I can stay off longer than 6 months. And as a consultant I don't have to "quit" when it's "working sabbatical" time.

Re: Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

#30

Post by patio11 »

tkahn6 wrote: post #27
patio11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did all the programming for BCC. I am not sure what you are specifically referring to with "syncing", but the code to all features discussed in this writeup is only a few hundred lines. Aside from having to put an HTTP client in my Java app it is fairly painless.

I think you answered my question. By syncing I meant that, for instance, when a customer makes a purchase, a whole chain of events unfolds (databases are updated, keys are sent out, analytics packages are updated).

Yeah, I originally did all of that via ejunkie and now it is all custom except for e-junkie wrapping the underlying API call. Back when HTML in notepad was the extent of my programming skill, having ejunkie keep stats and then hand updating a spreadsheet every month made sense. Now that I'm comfortable in Rails it is really easy to automate bookkeeping tasks like that.
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