The Codebelay Blog

Blog

  • How To Pitch to Venture Capital

    I got to work on demo software this week that was used to pitch Dev Khare, who works at Venrock Associates.

    Dev (pronounced just like DAVE) sees about 2 to 3 presentations per day and they’re mostly in the area of mobile computing.

    What are your thoughts on pitching to VC?

    Here’s what he said he likes to see in a pitch using just 5 slides:

    1. Your team, their skills relevant to the product you want funded, and who’s missing from your team.
    2. What market will you be serving? EG Our market is 50 million people and they all eat popcorn, but they have no way of telling people about popcorn. Here are the studies that back this up.
    3. Product slide: Here’s how we’ll do it. Also here’s what we don’t know yet.
    4. Here’s how we’ll sell to our first 100,000 customers and make $1,000,000 in 1 month. This is the example slide where you show how you get your customers through your product. (Show product demo.)
    5. These are our competitors, and we’re better than them b/c we have
      a blackbox for understanding popcorn.

    Say thank you. Take your prospective VC out to dinner (just kidding). That’s it. 5 slides.

    Dev said that you’d be surprised at how many people have 40 – 50 slides. You just need 5 because if the idea is compelling enough they’ll do the research and check your numbers.

    What do you think of Dev’s advice?

  • Webby Award Nominees Announced

    The Webby Award Nominees have been announced.

    Here’s the server breakdown:

    Apache: 193
    Microsoft IIS: 96

    Coming in a distant 3rd:
    IBM_HTTP_Server: 5

    The 51 remaining servers either didn’t give server header information, or were other web servers.

    For Apache Servers,

    48 running PHP
    16 running mod_perl

  • Stage I: Setting up SQL Tables and Ruby on Rails

    To develop Codebelay, I set up SQL tables using normalization. The database I selected was MySQL.

    Hivelogic has an excellent tutorial called Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger.

    I built my ruby on rails set up the hivelogic way, and have been quite happy with how fast LightTPD and fastCGI serve out database dependent web pages.

    The only thing I would change is adding a root account to my MacMini and using su to compiling and install files.

    Typing sudo tar zxvf some_package.tar.gz ; sudo ./configure ; sudo make ; sudo make test ; sudo make install — and then having to type in a password all on top of it turned out to be really tedious.

  • Welcome to the Codebelay Blog

    Before a car crashed into me while walking across Masonic and Page Street, I loved to rock climb. My right hand has yet to heal to the point where I can rock climb without feeling intense amounts of pain. In rock climbing, the term, belay, refers to a technique where a spotter carefully controls the rope so that the climber doesn’t fall very far.

    I’ve felt that I’ve worked on projects where although I was part of a team, the team didn’t work with eachother. Management and client demands would very often force coders to free climb without the benefit of belaying. When a coder would “take a fall,” she would do so without the benefit of a belay, and the results would often be catastrophic.

    The Codebelay project is designed so that coders can manage projects simply and safely. No coder should have to work without the safety of a belay. This project is guided by 3 simple principles which allows the requirements of simplicity and safety to be met:

    • Coders should know who’s working on their project and what their roles are. This sounds simple enough, but often many projects are managed by client bureaucrats. A coder should have a list of contacts that – although reflects the sorry state of heavy management projects – will allow the coder to successfully find the missing pieces of the puzzle by contacting the appropriate stakeholders.
    • A coding project requires metaphorical building materials. Thus, perfect asset management is necessary if code is to be built and delivered on time. I’ve added an asset manager to Codebelay.
    • Coders, who develop web applications, often lack a test harness or QA tool, for making sure that a web app can “go live.” Codebelay allows coders who work on the web to store links that can be tested. A simple user interface tells the coder either “all green” for the launch of a site, or at least one, red “stopper,” to alert the coder that something needs to be fixed.

    I was inspired to work on this project after reading many of the 37signals blog posts as well as Eric S. Raymond’s classic, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This blog documents the Codebelay project, and I hope that someone out there finds it useful.

  • About The Codebelay Blog

    Tech bytes and news that keep you out of harms way – That’s what inspired Jim Barcelona – a technologist – to write Codebelay.

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    Barce

    Codebelay

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    Jim “Barce” Barcelona maintains this great software product:

    • Sitebeagle — beagles make great watchdogs! Sitebeagle lets you know when a site has updated.