Solo Web Startup

1

14 Feb 2012

It's not too late to attend this ColdFusion conference
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OpenCF Summit is so inexpensive, it doesn't seem fair. Here's the pricing, hotel and transportation details.

The list of CFML speakers includes Gert Franz (Railo), Peter J. Farrel (Mach-II), Alan Williamson (OpenBD), Matt Woodward, and many more...

It's not too big, so you won't miss one session because you chose a different one. Here's the 3-day schedule. I'm especially looking forward to the Railo training, Unconference, hanging with all the cool kidz, and learning what it means exactly to partake in cf_merriment.

I went last year, and had a blast! See you there...?
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14 Mar 2011

Cloud Chronicle: Podcast on my web startup
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Interview Series Ep1 – Aaron Longnion of refynr.com

Mar 14, 2011

By Patrick Pushor

Interview Series Podcast

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Episode 1

Interview with Aaron Longnion about his social network feed filter startup refynr.com. We speak about his technology, how refynr.com came about, some of the tools used in the creation of the site, and how the cloud enabled Aaron to support his solo startup.

Links mentioned in the podcast:
http://hashtags.org/
http://www.crowdspring.com/
http://www.gosquared.com/livestats/
http://getsatisfaction.com/
http://www.mailchimp.com/
http://www.rackspace.com/

Podcast: Download

Tags: startup podcast

About the Author

Patrick Pushor
Patrick is a critical thinker based out of Western Canada with deep experience in virtualization and cloud computing.

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via cloudchronicle.com

Thank you very much, Patrick, for the interview! Excellent questions, and I had a lot of fun!
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9

14 Dec 2010

Refynr.com runs on ColdFusion 9 Enterprise now!
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On Rackspace Cloud Servers, Refynr.com has been switched from Railo 3.2 (beta) to ColdFusion 9.0.1 Enterprise, Multi-server (2 CF instances clustered on JRun so far).

Why would I switch from Railo CF to Adobe ColdFusion?
1. It was free:
  After my "Top 14 web startup tools" post over a month ago, Adobe contacted me with a donation offer I could not refuse: a free Adobe CF 9 Enterprise license and free CF Builder license to use for Refynr.com. WOW! I was shocked. Of course Railo is free, too, so read on...
2. My experience is with Adobe CF:
  After I learned about Railo "context", installation, JVM tuning, updates, and slight coding differences, I enjoyed using Railo, and it served me well for the first 3 months of Refynr.com; but, all my previous 10 years of experience with CF has been with the Adobe flavor, so I know the ins-and-outs of tuning, clustering, monitoring, and coding with it.
3. Maturity:
  CF 9 has been out for quite a while now, and Railo 3.2 is still in Beta (but will be released soon I think). It's been on many more high-end systems, for longer, with more bugs founds and fixed, and there's a larger online community to pull from if I need help. I will say the Railo Team has been very helpful and supportive of me and Refynr online, so it's not a knock on them at all
4. Built-in Monitoring:
  The built-in CF 9 Server / Multiserver Monitor and Server Manager is great! And I already have experience using them to manage, monitor, and tune CF 8 & 9 systems. Railo uses FusionReactor, which I hear is great, but I don't have experience with it personally, and it would have cost me money to get it.
I want to thank the various team members, and users of, from Railo who helped me get started, submit bugs, and iron out kinks as I tried to get this startup off the ground.

And last, but not least, I'd like to thank Adobe for this generous donation. It will allow me to run up to 10 CF instances in the Rackspace Cloud, which would have been very expensive or complicated for me to do otherwise. I'm doing this Refynr venture alone with my own cash, so any time and money I can save is a huge boost. As needed, I plan to scale to multiple Cloud Servers, add more CF instances, and upgrade server hardware & RAM to scale with demand. Since I already have experience with this setup from previous companies, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable that I and ColdFusion can handle the future together :D

Any questions or comments?
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1

10 Dec 2010

Refynr accepted into Microsoft BizSpark program
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I applied about a week ago, and this morning I got the happy surprise of being accepted into MS BizSpark program!

Here's the Refynr.com company profile: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ConnectDetail.aspx?Startup=82718

What does this mean for Refynr?
- It validates that Refynr is a good enough idea that Microsoft wants to be associated with it
- I get access to Microsoft tools and software
- I'll have access to start-up incubators, investors, support, and more
- Refynr gets visibility from the BizSpark network
- Could potentially use Microsoft Azure cloud to run Refynr.com: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ee461076.aspx?ppud=4
Exciting times!
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18

10 Nov 2010

Top 14 tools for my web startup
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I've been working on my solo web start up full-time for about 2 months now, and so this post is about the software, programming platforms/frameworks, operating systems, websites, and apps that I use to stay fast and productive.

First, let me quickly bullet-point my setup:

Local Development:
- Late 2009 MacBook Pro w/ 8Gigs of RAM
- Railo, with built-in web server
- Eclipse w/ CFEclipse, Subclipse, & MXUnit plugins
- MySQL Community 5.1.51
Cloud Server (Rackspace):
- CentOS 5.4
- Railo 3.2
- Apache 2.2
- MySQL Community 5.1.51
Top tools list:
1. Railo - similar to Adobe ColdFusion, but free and open-source, Railo (I'm using the free 3.2 beta version on my local development environment, which is compatible with Adobe ColdFusion 9.01). It's been great! Even though I've been working professionally with only the Adobe version of CF for 10 years, jumping to Railo was fairly painless, once I learned how to install it properly, etc.
2. Gmail w/ Google Apps - I set up refynr.com mail for GMail and Google apps cuz it's free and very easy to do. I created an info@ address and do all my communication and responding to feedback from there. I also use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for keeping track of competition, Refynr features, ideas, etc. This is a no-brainer.
3. Rackspace CloudServers: cost me all of $43 dollars last month, which included [1] bandwidth for over 70 Refynr Alpha testers (which does a lot of pulling from the Twitter & Facebook APIs), [2] full snapshot image backups of the server, [3] support via email or Live Chat, and [4] engineers that monitored and automatically rebooted my server when it went down mysteriously this past weekend. I'm happy; however, Amazon recently announced free pricing for lower-end cloud servers, and I'm keeping my eye on that...
4. HooteSuite - read and post with multiple accounts. I manage 2 Twitter Accounts, Facebook, and LinkedIn from it. I prefer it over TweetDeck so that I can log in from any computer any time without worrying about installing/updating. Also, the analytics for my accounts and Google Analytics for my websites are nice.
5. CFEclipse - it has great built-in support for Railo, and it's what I've already used for the past 5/6 years, so I found no need to try anything else right now.
6. MyVersionControl.com - free/cheap Subversion hosting, with more features than I need. I just need the SVN repo space (hosted and secure), and use the Subclipse Eclipse plugin with CFEclipse. Simple. Done.
7. MySQL - It's free and I already have a few years of experience with it. I did some preliminary investigation into the NoSQL options like MongoDB and CouchDB, but I don't need massive scalability (yet), so am sticking with what I know for now so that I don't get stuck to often. I'd rather just get er done at the moment.
8. CentOS 5.4 - pretty much an exact replica of RedHat 5.4, so there's lot's of online documentation and help. Plus, it came as an inexpensive option with Rackspace. :)
9. Sequel Pro - easy-to-use, free, and beautiful MySQL client for Mac. It does what I need 99% of the time, but sometimes I need to use MySQLWorkbench (which I found buggy and cumbersome for everyday use) for stuff like updating certain types of indexes or constraints.
10. Posterous - this blog runs on Posterous in case you didn't notice. It's great if I need to do a quick post from email, but I like it more for posting via web, adding quick slide shows, and being able to auto-post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. I get way more hits on my blog via Posterous than previous platforms I used. This is partially due to making sure it's in RSS aggregators like http://www.coldfusionbloggers.org/ and http://feeds.adobe.com/index.cfm?query=byCategory&categoryId=1&catego...
11. CyberDuck - their website says it all - "Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac & Windows." (and FREE!)
12. Seashore - Photoshop cost money, and GIMP is too complicated for me. I wanted something simple for common tasks. On Windows, that was Paint.NET. On Mac, it's Seashore! (note: I clearly need some better graphics skillz)
13. jQuery Mobile (Alpha) - it makes the site look good on most mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.), but also looks good on Firefox and Safari. Now, I'll just need to make Refynr.com look decent on IE 8+ and work out the kinks in Chrome. That's pretty good cross-browser/cross-platform compatibility with relatively little effort! And since it's in Alpha, it will only getting better in the next few months... Here's my post about implementing jQuery Mobile on Refynr.com.
14. CFML Open Source code - First, I decided to not use a ColdFusion Framework (even though ColdBox, CFWheels, and FW/1 were VERY tempting) because I wanted to write the core of Refynr.com from scratch and to make damn sure there's no performance issues when/if I need to scale Refynr.com. In my professional career, I have never built anything very big from scratch; I have always worked on legacy ColdFusion code. Here's the open-source ColdFusion code I've used so far:
  - MonkehTweet - http://monkehtweet.riaforge.org/ for Twitter API & oAuth integration
  - Facebook ColdFusion SDK - https://github.com/affinitiz/facebook-cf-sdk/ for FB API integration
  - ValidateThis - http://www.validatethis.org/ for form validation
  - cfUniForm - http://cfuniform.riaforge.org/ for building forms
  - Timezone.cfc - https://github.com/rip747/TimeZone-CFC for timezone management
  - MXUnit.org - for unit testing CF code
Honorable mentions (hope to use in the future) - LogBox, Rackspace CloudFiles, MemCached, MongoDB or CouchDB (?), VirtualBox, Parallels, ManyMoon, Chargify, Selenium, and IETester. And I am testing http://www.feedbackify.com/ for getting feedback off of Refynr.com, but may try http://GetSatisfaction.com at some point, too.

Comment on what tools you use for your startup...
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0

28 Sep 2010

my startup "coming soon" web page is up
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It's at http://refynr.com/

The website should look like the first screenshot, and I have a little early "Alpha sneak preview" displayed in the second screenshot.

(download)

Click here to download:
my-startup-coming-soon-web-page-is-up-GjrEJotBtayFsHCdDgaq.zip (267 KB)
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26

31 Aug 2010

When no programming jobs feels right, jump off a cliff!
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Metaphorically, of course. But still: what the hell's WRONG with me?! I resigned from a job for the first time in my programming career *before* I lined up a new job. And while overseas, no less. And I've had more interest in hiring me over the past 2 months than in my entire 10 year career previously. And I have a wife, a 4 year-old, and a 4 month old baby.

So, my crazy announcement is that I'm taking roughly 6 months to start my own web-based startup venture. Alone.

My problem, and occasionally my forte, is that I'm a gambler. Yes, I've spent a few too many hours in casinos playing Black Jack, but I'm not talking about that! I'm talking about gambling on my career. And no one has sufficiently discouraged me, even after averaging less than 18 months per full-time job over my career; even after selling my house, 2 cars, all my belongings, and leaving a great job in Austin 2 years ago to live overseas in Holland.

I can't really rationally defend my decision, but here's all I've got:
1. I really, really freakin' want to do this!
2. I don't have a job, so why not?!
3. My wife didn't say, "no"
4. My in-laws have graciously allowed us to live with them for 6 months. Cheap rent!
5. I think I have a really good idea (more on that below)
6. Life is short. Why keep all that money in banks & money markets when it wants to be spent on my latest whim?
7. I figure even if I fail horribly, I will learn tons more than I can working for someone else
8. I know I have to make this a full-time effort, because I'm too lazy with my off-hours and would never follow through with my ideas if I don't have the failure stick whacking me and the success carrot dangling in front of my nose at least 8 hours a day.
9. If I'm disciplined, I can spend more quality time with my family, so that's a WIN no matter what
So, what's my big idea? I'm not telling yet. Here's some hints:
- Anyone want a dead simple way to filter out the headache-inducing noise from social media (especially Twitter)?
- Railo in the cloud? Hells yes!
- Sencha Touch or JQTouch? You best believe
- One of the noSQL solutions, such as MongoDB or CouchDB? er, maybe...
That's all I've got so far. I will commence concentration and focus shortly, am ignoring new job opportunities, and will see if I have the fortitude to last 6 months as a Solo Web Startup (notice my blog's new domain name).

BTW - I will be looking for tons of user input from my blog readers and social media "friends" to test out the Alpha & Beta versions of my idea, so keep your eyes pealed, fellow nerds.
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About the Author

Patrick Pushor

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