Monthly Archives: July 2011

While sitting around the fire watching flames shoot sparks into the air, I wonder if I can actually make this work.

I’ve spent the last seven years working and going to school to be a biologist. I toed the line. I managed to get my education without becoming a total mindless automaton. I persevered and emerged with my degree ready to begin my career or continue with school so I could contribute to society. I planned to do something important for humanity like research cancer or do genetics work.

The hammer drops. The bloated government establishment leads to an economic collapse, the job market bottoms out, and all the sudden graduate schools are only taking 4.0 geniuses that never took so much as a summer off to have a ‘real’ job. It is now my eighth month of unemployment, sixth if you don’t count the two months I spent getting rejected from graduate school despite my ten years of employment experience, my two years of teaching experience, and my six months of research experience. Oh well. What the hell do I do now?

Enter Cabin Fever Software.

I’ve known about Cabin Fever Software for a while as David and I had previously been boat dock neighbors (a story for later perhaps). Software is a fairly alien subject to me. Of course I use software, I even remember the first version of Microsoft Golf (my dad was a fan and a database support guy for Sprint when I was a kid). To me, computers have simply been tools to produce projects and assignments for school and work. It was interesting to listen to David talk about it because it was his thing, and it is usually quite fascinating to listen to people talk about their passions. It never crossed my mind that I could be useful in such an endeavor, after all I was going to save humanity from genetic disorders and disease….

Last month David asks me if I would like to help him with Cabin Fever Software. My first reaction was something along the lines of “I don’t know anything about programming or software.” I think David said something like “exactly”. The premise behind all this was that he needed a non-techie to look at his user interface to see if the average small business owner could follow it. In general he needed the average internet user around to say “what does this mean” and “I don’t get it”. In my current disillusioned state I remained ambiguous.

After another week of working on my car, organizing my sock drawer, and watching my in-laws argue (of course I didn’t have my own place, unemployed remember?), I realized that it came down to this: I didn’t have anything meaningful to do. My prospects have dwindled to zero. Here is a long time friend offering me a share in his start up business, all I had to do was step up and learn something new. I’ve been shoving information into my brain at a ridiculous pace for years, whose to say I couldn’t let David and I be the ones to determine the new curriculum? Here I am writing a blog for the first time in my life from the living room of a cabin with the hum of the generator outside. David offered me something meaningful to do, and I was almost too stupid to accept because it wasn’t what I had already learned about. Laziness.

Yes, Cabin Fever Software is meaningful. If you don’t understand that sentence, you should read David’s entries (for one he is a better writer). We are going to help small businesses get what they need and generate products that actually help people. Let me put it in terms I can relate to better (I’d say terms you could understand better but who are you anyway?). When you go to the doctor with a complaint, the doctor is going to assume its the most common ailment with those symptoms and then prescribe a medicine that works for the highest percentage of people with that ailment. So if you are lucky enough to be entirely common and your illness is also entirely common, then you will be helped. If you or your illness are in any way unique there is likely no help for you. If there is one thing I learned from my biology training is that there is no true homogeneity in nature. We are not all the same. There is no cure all. Why should businesses be any different? Just as I think personalized health care is the only way to address medicine, so too do I like the idea of personalized software for small businesses.

Go easy on me, if you didn’t catch it earlier, this was my first time (blogging!).

I’m pretty stoked about a potential new partner/employee (terms not yet determined) here at Cabin Fever.

Over the last couple of years, pretty much everyone but me has fallen by the wayside as we (I, now) march toward releasing a product. I still say “we” here & there, and I do in fact get to consult with some pretty smart folks who have an (intellectual) interest in the company, but as for doing the work? It’s all me.

That’s actually been okay, because I write code pretty fast & it takes a team of several people to equal what any one of them could do on his/her own anyway–any benefit from multiple developers comes, IMHO, only after the addition of Coder #5 to a team, and even that’s horribly risky. Well, two guys can be somewhat faster than one, maybe, if they’re on the same wavelength, but three? No. Not over the long haul. Not if the project is at all complex. Just saying.

So, free rein to do what I think I should, plus intelligent advice from people not afraid (or perhaps even eager) to point out my boneheaded mistakes? Cool! Plus, I do get to work from my cabin.

Still. Scarecrow’s private beta test can’t credibly be stretched out for more than another couple of months at most, and there is a LOT of content to be developed. There’s a lot to learn, and it probably won’t all find room in what I use for a brain. Plus, a newcomer who isn’t a clone of me can’t be expected to know all the weird hacks I do to create websites.

Enter WordPress. Not just to host the blog. For the Cabin Fever and Scarecrow websites, as well (though not for the Scarecrow application itself).

As a software developer, I hate working with it. I strongly prefer other technologies…specifically, other programming languages than PHP. But you know what? I’m having to face this central fact: nobody but me cares that I don’t like it. It’s quick to set up, lots of people have worked very hard to add all sorts of features I’ll find useful, and so: I am working on a decent simulation of gratitude. After a while, it may seem real even to me.

This will boost productivity (I tell myself). New Person will not need to learn a bunch of coding/scripting tricks to be productive. I will have to take a week or so and migrate what content I have (meager, ’cause I’ve been coding instead, y’know?) to the new platform and set up all the fancy new bells & whistles. But afterward, things will be better. That which is intended to be parsed by readers of English will now be written in…English. As a concept, that ain’t all bad.

Really, I’m excited, and this is all good stuff. It just goes a bit against the grain, ’cause I prefer building things to using stuff other people built. I will, however, get used to it.

Will anybody but me ever care to what extent we’re dogfooding over here? For our core product (Scarecrow), maybe yes. For the site’s content? Probably not.

Welcome, O Brave New World!

Don’t look at me like that. The question gets sort of interesting, if you’ll just stare at it (instead of me) long enough.

Still not interesting. Well, keep trying.

…I swear, some people just have no attention span at all.

All right, I admit it: I didn’t think there was much to it, way back when we decided to mess with this stuff. So, what are we talking about?

If my website goes down, I want to know about it. I might need to take some immediate action, or I might just want to record how often it happens to inform some future decision. So, being a software guy, I wrote an app that’ll tell me.

Like hell.

Scarecrow gives it a good shot. It checks fairly regularly to see whether a site is responding. It tries three times before it decides there may be a problem. If something’s going on, it checks the site from several different locations. It stores information about outages in a database.

Sounds pretty good. So how come I’m not happy?

Because there are things we call “disputed” outages. Suppose a Scarecrow agent in Los Angeles says a site’s down. Say Chicago agrees. But Dallas says it’s up. What’s that all about?

Simple: the web server itself is running (at least intermittently…oh, let’s assume the geographical stuff is real just for a minute). I therefore conclude that some internet problem that doesn’t affect Scarecrow’s agent in Dallas is getting in the way. So, no problem, right? The server’s up, and that’s what I (as a business owner) am paying for, and the rest is kinda like mosquito bites in Alaska: part of the price of doing business in the digital age (if you’re writing a blog entry from an off-the-grid cabin via laptop, tethered iPhone & two-stroke generator, that is).

But. What if the mysterious routing problem is caused by my internet hosting provider? Or if not caused by them, what if it’s caused by their provider? What if it happens a lot?

So a lot of disputed outages can mean something. After staring at the data we’ve gathered through our beta testing, I’ve decided we need to make specific error messages (rather than binary up/down info) available when customers download lists of their outages. [Edit 12/21/2011: Done.]

That’ll help, some. But what do I really want? Lots of customers! Lots more data! I want to start tying outage information from Scarecrow’s agents to a map of the internet. I want our customers to be able to figure out whether an outage was limited to their server, their hosting provider, or the state of Kansas.

I want to take all that data and put it where anyone who’s interested can see it. I want to publish information about hosting providers and what they really offer their customers. I’ll bet some of them wouldn’t like it. Others might be glad somebody finally noticed the differences between them and their competitors.

Scarecrow in general is about improving transparency, making commercial website development and hosting less of a black box to business owners. So it fits the mission, and all, but we’re nowhere near ready to publish this kind of information.

But I think we just might offer a very competitively priced uptime monitoring service that doesn’t require a subscription to Scarecrow’s other monitoring, backup & restore functions. If enough people bite, for whatever reason seems good to them, I think it will increase Scarecrow’s value to the business owners we see as our core customers.

Plus, it’ll be sort of cool. Nothing will happen right away, but if we get the data…watch out, internet! We’re gonna be peeking where you least expect it. ALL of us.

Got some related ideas? Think I’m full of it? Let me know.