Castro's Blog

Seattle Mind Camp : Start-up 101

This session was focused on the experiences of BillMonk founders, Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom. BillMonk is an online service that helps friends track debts and stuff (e.g. CDs, DVDs). It is a rather clever and unique service that solves a real world problem. The BillMonk founders are ex-Amazonians who are applying the lessons they learned at the e-tailing giant to new areas.

Gaurav and Chuck currently work out of their respective apartments, which are conveniently located in the same apartment building, and are not currently accepting outside investments. Gaurav and Chuck are a few years out of undergrad and have the luxury of having few living expenses and responsibilities (e.g. no mortgage, no children, etc.). I certainly appreciate their super boot-strap approach to building their business; however, Pluggd is in a slightly different situation in that we're a bit older and have some of these "responsibilities" to take care of. That said, we're about as boot strap as BillMonk, but not quite as much.

Like Pluggd, BillMonk went with Ruby on Rails. They are using Debian Linux as their OS. They initially looked at MySQL, but ultimately concluded that Postgress would be a better fit for their needs. This interested me, because Pluggd went with MySQL. The two reasons Gaurav gave for selecting Postgress over MySQL were:

1. Better documentation
2. More mature support for transactions.

Because Pluggd doesn't deal with money, we don't have the same need for transaction support, but better MySQL documentation is something we've wished for. Ultimately, we've found that there were enough books and additional sources of MySQL support on the Internet due to its larger installed based.

Bill Monk also uses Pound as a software load balancer, which I thought was pretty interesting. Certainly, hardware based solutions like F5's Big IP offer both performance and feature advantages over Pound. However, free is pretty hard to beat. On this topic Gaurav admitted that they may have over engineered a bit due their time at Amazon, where scaling is always a big issue, and that they don't really need the load balancer given their current user base. Still, Pound is free and simple to set-up, so it seems like a reasonable decision on their part. I bet they will end-up needing it pretty soon anyway.

I was impressed with the founders and the service and wish BillMonk all the best. After they were done with their presentation a few of the other start-up founders, such as myself and the founder of AskMe, shares their experiences. I will provide more details in my next post.

Is Rails Schizo??

It has been a few weeks now since I started programming in Ruby and Rails. I really have it enjoyed it and I’m very impressed with Rails. However, I recently took some time to learn about the Ajax support in Rails and came away somewhat confused.

You see, Rails is an MVC (mode-view-controller) framework. However, the Ajax support in rails seems to encourage a developer to include view logic in their controller. Since one of the main benefits of Rails is the MVC framework, I was a bit confused by this.

Now, to be fair, my opinions here were formed after reading one article, Ajax on Rails by Curt Hibbs, and I’m still a Rails newbie.

Let me provide an example of what I found concerning. There form_remote_tag contains a paramter where you specify the ID of a DOM element that will be updated the action contain within the controller code.

For example,

form_remote_tag(:update => “my_list”, :url => { :action => :add_item }, :position => “top”)

This code snippet inidcates that add_item action is called in the controller when the form is submitted.

The controller code looks like this,

class ListdemoController < ApplicationController
     def add_item
          render_text "<li>"  params[:newitem]  "</li>"
     end
end

As you can see, HTML is generated from the controller. This means if you change the code in your view, you may need to go back and change the HTML generated by the controller so that is fits with the changes you made to your view. This is excatly the type of thing Rails avoids in so many other instances, and exactly why I’m so excited about Rails. What’s up with that!

I began to poke around the Ajax for Rails API documentation and found some reference to registering a client side javascript function that would be called. However, I wasn’t able to make this all work. I wasn’t able to find any good examples online and hope the new Rails book I ordered (Agile Web Development with Rails) will help.

In any event, I’m still very excited about Rails and hope this means there is still some opportunity for me to add to the community once I feel like I’ve overcome the learning curve.