16 Apr 2010 – Greensboro, NC – my mind in Blacksburg, VA
All we could do was wait and listen to the sirens. We were scared. There was no information other than “there is a shooter on campus. Stay away from windows,” and the increasing body count. Mobile phone communication silenced by an overwhelmed network.
I doubt I will forget that.
Instant messaging Tara, my best friend and partner, while she was in and out of connectivity hiding in a stairwell with others. Every time her connection dropped, I was literally dizzy. This seemingly happened for hours but realistically probably minutes.
No, I probably won’t forget that.
The news conference broke the silence. We were given a story, timeline, numbers, and the horror was realized. Thousands were brought closer over losses we could barely imagine.
I won’t forget that either.
But most important to this Virginia Tech alumnus, on April 16th, I won’t forget to celebrate being alive and know that you and I are lucky.
28 Nov 2009 – Overly Romanticized Home Office in Greensboro NC
When our company was in its infancy (we’re approaching toddler stage now) I thought a lot of decisions carried more weight than they actually did. Often times the pros and cons of certain situations were weighed endlessly and, as it is bound to do, it often comes out in the wash.
Of course, some decisions will be meaningful.
But in a startup, you make an ass-load of decisions a day. For me, when first embarking on this company building experiment, many decisions had a heightened perceived importance.
Sometimes we got emotionally invested in many of them (especially if one of us had already invested some sweat into one of the options). In reality, most of them don’t mean a thing. It’s your determination and drive that makes you keep going when your decision is the wrong one that matters.
If you’re starting a business now and your struggling with a decision (and my bet is, you are) do whatever it takes to move forward. Often a best case scenario: forcing yourself to get creative and execute all choices. It’s way more important to have a quicker pace at which you test your ideas than it is to make the right decision.
25 Aug 2009 – Greensboro NC, San Francisco CA, and numerous other locations
It’s been over a year since myself, Emily and Rob left our jobs to focus on Foodzie full time. I haven’t written extensively on what we’ve learned or the choices we’ve made over the past 12 months because things are happening so fast I’ve hardly had a chance to sit back and digest everything that we’ve done and learned. But we have some big things coming soon that I wanted to share.
At Foodzie, we started talking to our customers on day 1. We began building a prototype tailored directly to the problems of food producers. We built a lot from scratch in Ruby on Rails because there was nothing out there that would be able to work perfectly for our customers. We worked directly with producers to get feedback and design our product. We were able to move very quickly validating a number of product concepts. We used our application to raise funding. We used it to build our customer base. Our product and our team stayed very lean.
We wrote our own shopping cart. We wrote our own CMS. We wrote our own checkout logic. As we looked down the road at features we were going to have to build, we decided it was time to take a different approach.
Gandalf said, “All you have to decide is what you’re going to do with the time you are given,” and that’s very much how we feel at Foodzie. The Foodzie team has better places to put our focus than on building ecommerce features that are already out there ready to be leveraged.
Recently we’ve been working on switching our commerce application to an open source ecommerce platform called Magento – an platform with an amazingly large community. I’m happy to say that it’s going live very soon with a new design and many more robust features for our customers.
Now the entire infrastructure of our app is based on an open source project; I can’t tell you how good that makes us feel. We’re thrilled to be joining the Magento community and look forward to giving back.
The adoption of the Magento platform is going to allow us to spend more time learning from and improving our product for our customers. We look forward to this next technological chapter of Foodzie as we continue to provide an unparalleled experience for buying and selling the best artisan food online.
Our Fourth of July plans rock this year. When we were living in Blacksburg, one of our favorite events was Wine Down the Music Trail. It was a day of blue grass and… uh, wine. In the fall we always seemed to miss Floyd Fandango which was the cousin beer festival.
This year they’ve combined both events over two days with camping. YES!
A friend had this to say:
redacted: VA is starting to really get a lot of good breweries.
redacted: Hit Blue Mountain Brewery for their Evil8. Do it early in the morning.
1st gen macbook airs are severely limited. I keep running into the limitations of 2gb of ram. I didn’t think this would be an issue since all I’m doing is developing web apps. Naive is me.
The following is a great error message. Whoever is responsible for this, I was a witness to Clinton Nixon promising to buy you a beer.
Could not find the source association(s) :favorite or :favorites in model Pick. Try 'has_many :favorites, :through => :picks, :source => <name>'. Is it one of :product or :member?
I’ve been using git a lot recently but probably only about 10% of it; just enough to enable me to do what I need in order to manage several different lines of development. The Rubyist has a few git tricks in it that I really like. Here are a few that were new to me.
Your local git history is called the reflog
You can find individual commits locally by specifying the branch and a time:
$ git show master@{yesterday}
Or go back in sequence:
$ git show master@{5}
The rev-parse command, returning the SHA value of the commit:
