Weeknote #5+6

What a ride those two recent weeks were! I feel like the rollercoaster of my business had finally climbed the first peak and now is thundering downwards, gaining more and more speed.

Drupal hosting

Last weekend, the Drupal Dev Days took place in Munich. So far, it was the biggest German Drupal conference ever. Since work on the website took much longer than expected, I decided to delay its publication a bit more and use the Drupal Dev Days as the venue to launch our Drupal hosting products labeled DrupalCONCEPT.

So, on Friday evening, I sat in my Munich hotel room, getting more and more nervous. Not because I had gotten the first time slot on the schedule for my talk “Drupal in the Cloud”, but because I was becoming anxious how people would react to our business offerings. Well, in retrospect, the feedback I got there was nothing less than awesome! People came to me to ask me about details. Many were excited that we closed that gap in the Drupal services spectrum. The website design got praise, and I also got suggestions how we could make it yet more clear and informational.

And besides all the talking, I could do my first business deals, too. Already during the weekend, KontextWork announced they were partnering with us to host their DrupalWiki SaaS products. During the week, other new customers started populating their Drupal webspace on our servers.

The basic server infrastructure is running, but there are many construction sites we’ll still have to deal with. No boredom in sight.

Podcasting

This week really was as productive as it was busy. Additional to all the business stuff, I recorded the first episode of my new podcast Drupal Talkshow with my co-host Markus Heurung. We talked about the Drupal Dev Days, of course, and about the international DrupalCons in San Francisco and Kopenhagen. We also took a look at the Devel contrib module. It was a lot of fun and we plan on continuing the podcast on a bi-weekly basis.

Family

It’s not easy to keep a healthy family life when both parents are busy working on huge projects with deadlines to meet. I’m glad that working from the home office enables me to do my fair share of household chores and spend time with our sweet little daughter. Also, Carolin and I are lucky to have great relatives and friends that support us. We very much appreciate it that we’re not alone in taking care of Amalia while the creche is closed like this Thursday and Friday.

Overall satisfaction rating

(on a 5-smiley scale)

Weeknote #4

Website work

I really crushed it last week to finally get the web hosting website done. And apart from minor touches, it’s done and online. I decided to keep the site under wraps, though, to ceremonially reveal it at the Drupal Developer Days that take place in Munich next weekend.

IT infrastructure

Let me tell you: It takes a lot of effort to make IT management effortless. While I still stand by my decision to automate everything from the start, it’s not always easy to accept the price of a lot more preparation work. Just whipping up some servers wouldn’t have taken me that long, but if you want to build automated processes, you have to think them through before you spend even more time implementing them. I had planned to go live with our Drupal hosting products in April, but there was just too much tech to handle.

(Warning: Sysadmin talk ahead) Last week, I decided to upgrade Chef to 0.8 because 0.7 has seemed really outdated for some time now and I experienced some confusing behaviour with our installation, too. The upgrade took almost a whole work day because one new component called RabbitMQ didn’t want to start but neither didn’t give useful error messages. I had to do some test installations on fresh servers and eventually found the cause in a discrepancy between DNS and the /etc/hosts file. Additionally, a software packaging bug in the chef-server package (a wrong symlink, as I later found out) broke the Javascript that’s essential for the Chef web interface. That wasn’t a big deal, though, because Chef 0.8 introduces a new utility called Knife that lets you manipulate configuration data from the command line. And no GUI is as good as no GUI.

Working with tools like Chef is an investment that’ll pay off eventually: With those automated processes, we’ll have to invest minimal effort into maintaining and growing our infrastructure later.

Business Development

Getting the Drupal hosting website ready was my main goal for last week, and I’m happy to have reached it. Now I’m preparing my talks for the Drupal Dev Days which will draw some traffic to the website — hopefully by many new Drupal hosting customers.

After the conference, I’ll concentrate on creating website content in the form of blog posts, knowledge base articles and podcasts.

Family life

I have to admit, starting a business while my girlfriend is writing her thesis isn’t the best timing. When both parents are busy-busy-busy with deadlines looming, even the question who does the grocery shopping can become a conflict — let alone the one who’ll spend the next hours out on the playground with our 2-year-old.

That’s where I’m grateful for Gary Vaynerchuck’s calming first rule in “Crush It!”: Family first. Always.

Weeknote #3

Last week showed that defining priorities is essential when you’re starting a new business.

Traveling

When I voiced my hope to get our hosting website online this week in my previous weeknote, I didn’t think of the Perl seminar that would have me out of office for four of five days this week. So I only had Monday and the travel time on Tuesday and Friday to get the most important tasks done. By the way, I still enjoy taking the train to work, especially if getting there takes me a few hours. I kept the Bahncard 100 which lets me travel by train as much as I need for a flat monthly fee. So, for last week’s seminar, I just had to reserve a seat in a train that goes all the way from Freiburg to Wolfsburg to secure myself 5 hours of solid work time in each direction.

Offline Training

The seminar went fine. I had twelve participants eager to learn Perl and three days to teach them the most important basics. Which is not a comfortable time frame, because actually only explaining all the topics takes more than two days, and then the trainees haven’t written a single line of code themselves. But they got to a basic understanding of the language which was my expressed goal for the seminar. Together, we hope that there’ll be a second seminar where we’ll be able to look at practical problems and more advanced aspects of Perl.

Spending all day in a classroom and the evening in a hotel room still isn’t my preferred way of teaching, so I’ll put more effort into promoting our online trainings.

Training Material

In advance of the seminar, I had to spend some time on my training material. Despite it having matured over more than 8 years now, it’s still not perfect in its explanations and examples and it still contains a few typos and glitches. Additionally, for a few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the format I could best maintain it in the future. The LaTeX format in which I had written the book started to show real limitations, especially because I had chosen it for its printing quality but now needed a format for online presentation.

After I spent some hours on looking — and deciding — for a future format, I got back to my original goal of working on the training manual itself. (BTW, I chose HTML and will explain the reasons in a separate blog post.) But departing time came quickly and the seminar took up the rest of the week.

Website

In the end, I didn’t have the time to do the finishing touches on the webhosting website, so I’ll have to postpone the site launch for another week. There maybe would have been enough time, though, if I hadn’t embarked on my journey to a better book and paper writing format.

Those tool and format discussions are dangerous because they can quickly derail a project and bring productivity to a low. Instead of working on your content, you start researching and testing different “solutions” that could replace your working one. Sometimes, “research” is just an euphemism for procrastination. If you have people that pay for your living without asking for a quick ROI, you may be able to go on Holy Grail expeditions. But in a business, you need to focus on what directly benefits your customers. With a training manual, that’s its content, not the format it’s written in.

The second priority is business development, for example with a website. That’s why I’ll measure the success of the new week by how much new business I’ll have generated in its end.

Weeknote #2

Revisionism

Starting with the week after Easter, I’m now working as a full-time self-employed. And to comply with weeknote custom, I renumbered my weeknotes so the one from last week now is #1. All previous weeknotes, written during the business launch preparation phase, got negative numbers. The advantage of this change is that if (rather when) I have to compute the current weeknote number, I can use the Weeknote Calculator.

Secure Living

My application for state founding subsidies has been accepted! Yay! I’ll be granted nine months of unemployment pay with 300 € on top, no strings attached. That means I can develop my business in a sane pace without worrying about my family starving.

Online Training

The new Freistil Campus website is working great. I’m very happy to have moved from Moodle to Drupal because I can do so much more with the site now. As I’ve told before, we’re already using it for the new Perl Meisterkurs that started this month, and it’s so much fun to experience motivated participants that fill the seminar group with postings and literally beg for new course material so they can continue learning.

I’ll start working on a bunch of new training projects this week, including some free webinars about development topics like version control. My main focus will be two big online workshops I’ll call “Water” and “Ice” for now.

High Performance Webhosting

Work on our hosting system is going fine, all the base infrastructure is in place. Especially the monitoring and security systems have already proven to work great. The former by waking me up in the early morning to tell me I had forgotten to configure the resource allocation of one web server which then gradually ate up all memory and went down in flames. The latter by alerting me of of a mysterious change of a system program that, as I found out an hour of anxiety later, had been caused by a software update I had done the previous day.

I’m not happy to report that I still haven’t finished work on the hosting product website. But since everything else is running in its tracks I’m optimistic that next week will be launch week. (He said, in his child-like naïveté…)

Weeknote #-4 (week 10, 2010)

Business planning

Much time this week went into the business plan for Freistil-Consulting. When I tweeted about it, @jkleske promptly teased me: “business plan? haven’t you read Rework yet? ” What he meant was that, according to 37Signals’ latest business book, “planning is guessing”. And the numbers I use in the business plan actually are vague projections for the next three years. But first: I do have to present a business plan with a long term financial perspective to get state subsidies. And, more important: By replacing those guesses with the actual numbers, I’ll get my first financial controlling instrument for the company. And boy, do I wish I had such a thing while running my previous businesses!

BTW, Johannes, I started reading “Rework” this morning. And I look forward to reading your very own weeknotes!

IT Infrastructure

I’m having fun playing with all those open source solutions that enable us to run an IT infrastructure business. There’s Chef for automation, GlusterFS for data replication, JailKit for securing customer access, and so much more. I really enjoy learning to use (utilize, even!) those tools for the lean operation of our IT.

Already after some hours of Chef hacking, I’m able to have a Drupal server running in under 5 minutes, from launching the EC2 instance over installing the necessary packages and configuring user access to starting all the services. Thank you, Opscode!