Midnight Oil

I noticed the other day that some of the organizers in The Scene (ie. Atlanta startup culture) are hosting a meetup to talk about the next steps needed by the startup community. In big bold letters are instructions detailing that possible attendees should evaluate themselves according to these criteria:

Who SHOULD Attend

If one of the following phrases describes you then you SHOULD attend this event:

• Entrepreneurs who “Swing for the Fences”
• Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists and Institutional Investors
• Service Providers that service the Startup Community
• Other Supporters of the Startup Community Ecosystem

Who Should NOT Attend

If one of more of these labels describes you more than one of the previous labels then you SHOULD NOT attend this event:

• Lifestyle Entrepreneurs (emphasis mine)
• Small Businesses using the Web for marketing
• People who prefer the security of employment
• Developers, Designers, Freelancers
• Internet and Network Marketers
• Interactive Agencies

No Lifestyle Entrepreneurs?

As a recovering wannabe “Swing For the Fencer”, I’m dismayed at the specific exclusion of lifestyle entrepreneurs. When did running a successful-but-not-Google-size business become a failure? Wouldn’t The Scene be much better off with dozens or hundreds of successful small businesses as opposed to a handful of mega hits and hundreds of failures? Let’s keep this list growing at a healthy clip, while keeping this one as small as possible. I know people love to throw around fail-fast as a mantra, but I prefer to win-slow. Successful small business that pays the bills? Put me down for one, please.

In my own experience, I was only able to truly get a shot at success when I stopped swinging for the fences. When I stopped dreaming about VC money, IPOs, and a Google buyout, I set about to actually building a revenue model for my projects. In addition, I stopped pursuing ventures that had no underlying business model besides the get-big-get-bought prayer. All of a sudden, I started making money. It’s not a lot, but it’s growing. I bunted my way to first base, and now I’m trying to figure out how to steal second.

The Atlanta Ruby Users Group (ATLRUG) recently moved their meetings to a much friendlier location for me. Rather than heading up into the forbidden north of Atlanta, it is now being held in the convenient location of Tech Square in Midtown. Of course this probably means nothing to anyone reading this from outside Atlanta.

In any case, it was a really great group, and they were very welcoming to new people, of which there were very many. Following the free pizza and pre-meeting chit-chat, we saw two presentations.

Metaprogramming

First up was Stephen Touset with a talk on metaprogramming. This is what is going on behind the scenes with all the method_missing stuff. Probably the most well known example would be the dynamic finders (ie. “find_by_email_and_username”). Stephen delved deep into metaclasses, and it was fairly confusing. I’ve dealt with class_eval and such before, but mainly from a “copy someone else’s stuff and modify to suit” sort of way. As I said during the meetup, “It’s possible to do metaprogramming without knowing what you’re doing.”

Nginx

Mark Percival followed Stephen with a presentation on Nginx, a fast little web server. I’ve always been a fan of Apache, but mainly because I felt safe with it. Even though it was a pain to configure, I knew that if I ever had to ask “How do I do X on the web?” then the answer would be in Apache language.

However, it never occurred to me that it might be overkill. As Mark explained, if all your Apache server is doing is proxying to mongrel, then it’s a big hammer for a tiny problem. The memory footprint is fairly high, and the configuration is a pain. Face it, Apache is not very friendly.

Mark claimed that Nginx was friendlier. To be fair, the config file was shorter. However, it still looked fairly arcane to me. I guess easy is in the eyes of the beholder.

Still, the memory issues are something I can’t ignore. Obsidian Portal runs on a VPS from Rimuhosting, so memory is a scarce resource. If I can reclaim enough memory to run another mongrel instance, that would be quite a coup. However, the real offender on my VPS is Tomcat. What!?! Tomcat!?! Well, I needed something to run Solr, and Tomcat is the only servlet container I’m familiar with. So, even though it’s a memory hog, it’ll have to stay for now.

Overall thoughts

All in all, the meetup was great. As I said, everyone was very nice, and all seemed fairly down to earth. There were no pissing contests over who was the better hacker, and newbie questions were answered honestly and humbly. I can’t wait until next month’s meeting. Maybe I’ll even try to scrape something together to present.