Chris Page – Software Engineer

Lil Wayne loves Pitt too!

Two weeks down, this blog is due for an update – time has been flying!

As far as home life in Pittsburgh goes – ROCK. I’m currently staying roughly between one of Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh University’s campus intersections – the architecture is gorgeous. I enjoyed a meal at the famous Primanti Brothers down the street, learned the public transit ( a work in progress… ), and discovered a few open mic hot spots I’ll be hitting up eventually – oh, and Lil Wayne at the Post Gazette Pavilion was also ROCK! I’ve had numerous other experiences and visited quite a few restaurants, but won’t detail all my eating habits here

As far as Lockerz goes… ROCK ON! I’ve made some new friends, thoroughly enjoyed many philosophical discussions, and am getting knee deep into working on the next best thing. Today was a moment for Lockerz history – as we saw an incredible traffic increase this morning – ranking 4 on Google Trends around 10 a.m.

The boost seemed grass roots in nature, as people are catching wind and telling their friends, who are telling their friends. The most personable for me was Amber’s friend made a comment about needing a Lockerz invite to join the site, not even realizing I work there. Small world? Needless to say, he got the invite.

I won’t detail much else about the job – you’ll have to keep tabs on the site! Need an invite? Let me know.

Night shot of Pittsburgh, PA - our new home city!

I’ve been quite busy lately!  Amber and I decided to leave Morgantown, WV to pursue better opportunities wherever we may fall.  We bunked up with family for a few weeks… a grueling thing with a 2 month old.  Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to stumble upon the next big thing!  Spending so much time increasing my online presence has paid off – as I received a call a few weeks ago from Lockerz CTO, Peter Meulbroek.

Peter and I exchanged a few phone calls – I could tell there was something “right” about the vibe I gained.  Three weeks later I drove into Pittsburgh for a lengthy yet fun and relaxing 5 stage interview – their idea is spectacular and the team was very talented and cool with a work hard and play harder mentality, perfect.  I realized “I’m going to make this happen”.  Thankfully the team at Lockerz shared that realization, and I’m very proud to announce that as of July 27th 2009, I will begin my first day as a ground floor Lockerz technical team member!

This proves it… I’m a startup junkie!

Things are moving very quickly, with only a week to relocate, and it reminds me of one of Amber’s favorite sayings:  “Good things take time, Great things happen all at once.” – this seems to hold true for me, a man of extremes to say the least!

Everybody involved in the process made it feel absolutely “right”.  I’m super psyched about the challenging workload ahead, and Amber and I both have never been so happy with the direction life is taking us!

Go check out Lockerz.com!

My wife and I found a baby sitter to watch our daughter, Gabriella, tonight, and we were able to enjoy a Saturday night out, finally!  Upon our return home, our sitter and good friend notified us that at midnight June 14th EST, Facebook opened up username based URL’s – or to us tech savvy people, vanity URLs or permalinks.  Facebook did already have permalinks to user profiles, but they were difficult to remember and non-arbitrary.

While many major companies were able to acquire their “facebook/mycompany” URL ahead of public release, I know many will be in competition to get theirs ASAP. Our sitter quickly rushed home to be ready to snatch up his – I was unfortunate to still be stuck using my middle initial:

facebook.com/chriswpage

With as many software people named Chris Page – I didn’t expect for it to be easy…but what really chaps me, is a dancer in Australia got to it first!  WTF?  Amber was equally disappointed in the commonness of our last name, when she too had to use her middle initial:

facebook.com/amberdpage

You can register your vanity URL at facebook.com/username.

I see this all the time:  “I’m building a website, but I don’t know what the best technology to use is?  This guy says PHP,  that guy says Ruby.  What’s better?”.  While there are definitely a handful of developers that will quickly jump to share my point, there are far too many that have biases for certain technologies and will quickly defend them with a bullet list.  Avoid those guys with biases – their tool belts are smaller.

Some things to Consider

Choosing the best technology really depends on what it has to do.  You wouldn’t hit a screw with a hammer?  Well, you can… but you shouldn’t.  Choose your website technologies based on what it has to do and what it takes to create and support it.  Some things to consider:

• Budget and Market Cost
• Continued Support and Development
• Scalability – meaning, when new problems arise, will the solution be able to meet and defeat those problems?
• Demographics – how well does the workforce powering your technology cater to your product’s needs?

Simple Sites

Say, perhaps, you want to build a small website to advertise a product or yourself.  It needs a few dynamic options, like a contact form, and maybe a shopping cart. I highly recommend exhausting service oriented solutions before going custom.

You could quickly find a web developer, blow a few hundred bucks, spend several weeks customizing and tweaking, and there you have it – no real support, you may or may not have a scalable back-end to manage it, and future expansions become expensive.  Or…

You could throw up a wordpress.com site for your landing page, link it to an inexpensive shopping cart service like e-junkie.com, and have significantly more bang for FREE by gaining access to thousands of plug-n-play plug-ins to extend your site with gallery applications, feeds, sharing tools, SEO management tools, as well as all the support of a service like e-junkie on call for your every e-commerce need.

See where I’m going with this?

More Complex Project

Lets envision you need something more complex than a personal page.  How about, a niche social network?  You want your own version of Myspace, and white label solutions just don’t have what it takes.  So you’ve raised thousands of dollars in angel investment, got your business plan, and are perplexed by the question of this post, “What technology?!?!”.  In this case, I would suggest considering the labor force and scalability behind each technology in correlation to what that is going to mean for your budget.

PHP Frameworks

While PHP has a huge work force, and many success stories, the language itself is rather controversial, as are philosophical differences in it’s “thousands” of frameworks.   A handful of frameworks are well-known, such as Symfony, CakePHP, Zend, CodeIgniter, KohanaPHP; though being an expert level PHP developer, I can tell you that many of the PHP frameworks, well, quite frankly, suck.  It’s new and easy to learn, and bloated with newbies making decent money, but not deploying consistent theory or solid code.  This is not always their fault, PHP lacks as a new language.

PHP also brings a lack of legacy support with each new version.  Consider the lifespan and size of your project.  Does this site need to run code for several years?  How difficult might it be to migrate old code to new versions of the language as they are released?  Just an example:  When  PHP5 released, it left thousands of web hosts outdated and incapable of updating without major financial and time expense due to the fact that PHP5 had changed syntax to introduce OOP, which broke PHP4.  To simply upgrade to PHP5 would break millions of websites without those webmasters first learning the changes in the language and making updates to their scripts.  Such scenario meant serious problems for web hosts that wanted to support latest technologies for new clients while maintaining legacy technology for existing clients.  PHP6 bodes better, but will still admittedly face similar problems.

As for the workforce, it’s just too easy to get into PHP.  The skill level required to create a PHP site is significantly less than that of other languages.  It’s the nature of PHP – Hypertext Pre-Processor, which, to many, is code (pun intended) for HTML on steroids.  Your average MySpace fanatic knows a bit of HTML these days, PHP is just the next informal step for many.  If you can find a skilled Object Oriented Programmer (OOP) – you’re well off, but the work force powering PHP is predominately less read into computer science theory and less likely to deploy best practices.  Why should they? – that’s all part of the beauty of the language.

Not to say a quality website can’t be developed in PHP, but I haven’t worked with any particular PHP Framework that really nailed it for me as a perfectionist.  You’ll find many like me in the PHP work force:  “just another php framework author”.  There seems to be an abundant number of us that find it difficult to produce quality code in popular frameworks, causing us to resort to building our own.  Mine is coined Typhoon.

Though, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE PHP and have developed numerous websites in the language.  I also look forward to the great new benefits in Version 6.  When you come down to picking PHP for your choice as a platform tool, just be sure the scope of your project is small to medium sized, speed of development being important, and ongoing support of the project being minimal.  Past that, the coding standards recognized by the PHP community are just too flexible and inconsistent for me to feel comfortable  spending significant time and expense on a bigger PHP site.

Django

“Developed four years ago by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly.” – from the creators of the Django Project

Now Django is a cool framework built in the Python language, and perhaps the premier web framework of Python. Unlike PHP, Python is a general utility language. It’s usage can be found in many aspects of computer science from desktop applications, to video games, to web development – and it has been around awhile.

Lets keep in mind the quote above though.  It was developed by-and-for the newsroom.  As such, it caters VERY well to companies that have a similar infrastructure.  While you can develop many applications regardless, that fundamental purpose gives the framework an overall flavor that may not be quite as flexible in every problem domain.

The built in content management system (CMS) feature of Django is really quite a gem.  It’s effective at allowing developers to rapidly generate applications for non-technical people to manage.  Would I use it for a social network?  Probably not as my first pick.  Would I use it for news syndication site?  Hell yes.

Python has been around since the early 90’s and has had sufficient time to incorporate advanced computer science theory and stabilize.   The workforce powering Django applications is also significantly more well-read than the PHP workforce ( I say this loosely, of course ), as the Pythoon workforce has been around longer in general.

Django can sleep safe at night knowing it was built on a stable language that doesn’t anticipate significant change year after year, making it a great platform for websites requiring long term support and development.

Ruby on Rails ( Soon to merge with MERB in Rails 3 )

Talk about some BUZZ!  I’ll admit I did not want to learn Ruby on Rails at first.  I love learning technology, but when Rails was just gaining it’s hype, I was getting deep into PHP and tended to stay in the PHP world.  Mistake at the time, on my part.

Rails identifies itself as a “web framework”.  Unlike Django, Ruby on Rails was developed to tackle many more of the standard problems developers face on a much broader sense of web development.  This by itself should not be translated as “Rails is the creme de la creme” for your web project, but it does make it a strong candidate to initially consider.

When to Consider Rails

• You have a project with many developers, possibly several contractors that will come and go as needed.
• You need fast scalability and flexibility due to a multi-faceted problem domain, ie:  niche social networks tend to start simple and then tack on lots of complex features.

Some Pros

In terms of computer science, 9.9999 times out of 10, problems we face in development are problems we’ve answered time and time again, either in theory or practice.  Thankfully, the Rails community innately conforms to the DRY Principle ( don’t-repeat-yourself ).  The community also drastically alleviates extra invention faced by developers, simply by embracing, building upon, and reinforcing community accepted solutions.  The now famous Rails motto:  “Convention over Configuration” sets a tone where the community expects eachother to follow a standard set of approaches versus relying on the individual’s limited resources to reach the same conclusions others have already reached.

Not only is it a motto, it’s an obstacle for “do-it-my-way” programmers, as it’s rather difficult to make a Rails application without doing it the “Rails way” – things will just not go smoothly if you attempt to break standards.  As developers tend to think differently about the same problem domain, Rails lends itself as a great framework to conform the result of their different approaches to the same represented solution.  In identifying conventions and standards, developers of the rails community spend significantly less time “re-inventing the wheel”, and more time knocking out features and drinking beer.

Some Cons

It’s memory intensive/innefficient.  MERB is merging with Rails 3 – which promises to improve performance, though in the meantime, I have several Rails applications running for small sites where I should have deployed PHP, I’m noticing I’m low on memory due to such, which ultimately costs me more money to keep my servers up to par with my Rails demands.

Windows users tend to have a more difficult time with Rails whereas the PHP community has gone through a few more lengths to make development in windows fairly painless.  Rails is significantly is better to develop on unix-based platforms, like Linux and Mac.  Windows users will need to go through extra hoops to keep up with dependencies largely created and maintained by the unix-based users – though, if you’re a serious web programmer using windows as your primary platform, you should consider weening off sooner than later anyways.

Rails isn’t THAT light weight.  It incorporates a lot of functionality and sub framework patterns that you just may never use on some projects.  Again, Rails 3 promises to improve in this area as well.

[Conclusion Pending]

It’s been a hectic few weeks, and I’ve hardly had extra time to keep up with my blog. While I’m supposed to be taking a Saturday away from the computer, I couldn’t help myself this evening.

This afternoon I decided it was time to upgrade my phone. I’ve had the same phone for almost 5 years now. Needless to say, the upgrade was *free* — it would have been completely free, but I tossed in the 2 year warranty, which scored me a nifty belt strap-able case and blue tooth ear piece to boot.

I went with Sprint’s Rumor by LG. I didn’t go all out like you’d expect a technology buff to do, but I’m satisfied with it. It’s a sleek little phone with a 1.3 mega pixel camera/video recorder, a slide out keyboard, a nice interface and some pretty lights.

I also went to Matt O’Donnell’s wedding, which was absolutely beautiful! I picked up my wonderful girlfriend, Amber, in PA, drove god knows how many hours to Virginia Beach, then spent 3 amazing days at a beach house drinking it up with the guests and man/woman of honor. The only downside was the driving… on the way home we got a bit lost in D.C., which was a nightmare to get out of — though we saw an amazing hotel that we’re definitely going to make a trip to sometime.

Final report is I picked up a second part time job. It’s another startup! You know me! I feel they have a GREAT idea and the fact that they have some venture capital to back it really helps. So, now I’m officially a lead architect for 3 web based startups, hence the long delays in between blog posts… What do you think? 6 figure income, 1 year? 2? Wish me luck!

More to come, stay tuned kiddos.

So, you’d think the hype around social networks would be long gone by now? NOT! I actually think we’re just getting to the good part. Despite however our economy is doing, there is still lots of money to be made in social networking if you know where to look.

All the easy stuff is out of the way by now, and even much of the obvious stuff at the level after that is done or underway. So where do you look? I’ll tell you: “integration with all the niches”.

We’re at a point where networks are driving traffic from one to another. It’s a lot of the same users, trying on different shoes. You can be king of your throne one day, and find out 20,000 users just leaped to Facebook the next.

Don’t quote me to anybody important too fast, but just food for thought: I think the next successful social network move is one that keeps you linked in no matter where you are. Wether that be more with mobile devices bringing the off-line world online, technologies such as Open Social or OpenID linking gaps from site to site, platforms for extending social sites to niches — possibly allowing niches to take advantage of the rich user base of larger sites?

I know there is a lot of debate on this, mostly because everybody is trying to come up with the next scheme! So what’s it gonna be……

Btw, I’ve been getting an eery feeling that my laptop is tapped? How common is that? I won’t explain what happened in this post, maybe the next.

Google, April Fools!

How many people got caught by Google’s April fools joke this year?

“Virgle: Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”

I managed to get Mary, COO at Moguldom, to fall for it. Hehehe! Everybody else was on to my scheme though, oh well! I love Google.

Starcraft 2

I was practically born on the original Starcraft and Brood Wars expansion. I spent much of my teenage life perfecting the Zerg rush, and eventually mastered the Terran defense with a wonderful firebat-drop counter attack. So I was quite excited yesterday when Dan sent me a link to the new units in Starcraft 2. I like what I see. At the very bottom of the Tauren Marine page there seems to be a spoiler hint, though I can’t be certain. Will mercenaries be apart of the new game?

So many questions! Though, I’m glad it’s still at least a year away from release, as I have a lot of business plans to knock out beforehand! It’d be a shame to make a mistake and drown all the potential in a video game. Though, it’s not just any video game, Starcraft 2 looks to be the nectar of the gods IMHO.

The New Relics – one rock’n band!

Aside of Google’s games and video games, everybody go check out The New Relics. They are a Morgantown, WV based band, and they pretty much rock. I saw them a few times when I lived out in Morgantown, they are touring up and down the east coast these days. I’m on a mission to hook them up with a Venue in Shepherdstown so they have an excuse to come play for me. I’ll be posting MySpace bulletins, and what not, if it pans out, so you locals better show up!