Macbook Air or Pro?

When the Macbook Air was released in January 2008, I was a skeptical that it could take the place of a developer's Macbook Pro. The founder of RealSelf bought the first model and endured countless trips to the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced and other technical issues resolved. I dubbed it the "Macbook Error".

Too Much Coffee? Switch to Matcha Green Tea

Growing up in Seattle with Starbucks and other coffee stores on every corner, it was easy to develop a serious coffee habit.  Every company I've worked for since college has provided automatic coffee machines which grind and brew a fresh cup at the press of a button.  

Standard green tea bags are okay if the tea leaves are high quality, but plain tea is too thin to be a replacement for coffee.  Three years ago I found a sample of DoMatcha tea at Whole Foods.  I liked the taste but the price was a lot higher than green tea bags, so I went for the volume discount and bought the largest size (2.8 oz) of the 2nd harvest non-organic.  Whipped up with some milk into a matcha latte, it was a great substitude for coffee.

When that 2.8 oz container was empty, I went back to Whole Foods and noticed a few other brands of matcha.  Over the past 2 years, I've tried at least 3 other brands of matcha from Whole Foods and there was something off about each one.  Often they looked and tasted like twigs instead of the fine powder in DoMatcha.  Apparently to hit a lower price point, the producer ground up the whole stem instead of just the newest leaves.  In the Vancouver, BC Whole Foods I saw some matcha from China that was packaged in a small plastic bag.  It was the right color, but had a strange chemical taste.  From my trip to China, it wasn't hard to see how a Chinese farm that managed organic certification could still be affected by nearby sources of air and water pollution.  Or they could be using chemical fertilizers.

The problem was, each time I bought a cheaper brand from Whole Foods, I felt like I had to use it up before going back to DoMatcha.  But because the cheap matcha tasted bad, it took me almost a year to finally finish it off.  My joints seemed more sensitive and squeaky when I drank too much coffee and I started having painfull rosacea acne flares, so I decided to try switching completely from coffee to matcha green tea.  I still had a bit more of the cheap matcha to use up and I wanted to save other people time with a photo showing the difference between DoMatcha and another brand sold at Whole Foods.  Both were packaged in air-tight mylar containers and have nice packaging, but as you can see in this photo, the DoMatcha is much greener.  The other brand tasted like it looks -- twiggy brown.

A 2.8 oz container is 33 half teaspoon servings, so it ends up costing about a dollar per cup. That's a lot less than wine, beer and juice, and matcha is a lot better for you. Don't waste your money on the cheap matcha -- it you want matcha buy the real thing, made of Sencha green tea leaves from Japan without any twigs.

And yes, I did successfully switch from 4-6 cups of coffee per day to DoMatcha and I feel a lot better. My joints don't squeak any more, I feel much more "zen" than the amped-up rush that comes with coffee.

Drupal to Yii Migration Tips

So you've gotten fed up with the coding contortions required to scale Drupal and you've decided to switch to Yii. Now comes the daunting task of deciding what and how to migrate.

Read our tips first and save yourself time and frustration.

A Great Idea Before its Time (and Dropbox)

In 2001, I tried to start a business based on code I had developed for Yale to enable online registration and management of yearly class reunions.  Reunions are multi-million dollar events, and the system I developed in 1999-2001 is still running Yale’s reunions today.

I used AP credits to skip a semester and flesh out the idea further.  I set up an office in my mom’s basement and set to work writing the business plan.  Ultimately, I concluded that universities were so slow moving that I would need a partner (or acquirer) for help with the sales process.  My colleagues at Yale helped arrange a meeting with the company who was building their alumni network.  The dot-com bust was already in full force, and then 9/11 happened.  The company thanked me for my presentation but passed.  I wasn’t passionate about event registration, and there was already a well-funded competitor (Cvent.com) that I correctly predicted would dominate the space. 

As with most startups, my initial idea wasn’t great.  On the bright side, I identified a problem that most people had yet to experience – synchronizing documents across multiple devices.  You’ve heard of DropBox, right?  Well, this was 2002, and DropBox was founded 5 years later. 

Sure, you could use rsync to sync your files, but it was too complicated for 99.999% of people.  The primary reason for DropBox’s success is its simplicity. Rsync is complicated to configure, prevents people from sharing files with friends and won't let you access files on a public computer.

I decided to start from scratch and create a synchronization system that used the protocol that web browsers and web sites use to communicate so you could access your files with any browser.

Continue reading for the ironic conclusion

Why this Internet Boom isn't Bubble 2.0

John Battelle and Fred Wilson have written great posts explaining why the surge in valuations and VC rounds raised by Internet companies is very different from the 1999-2000 bubble.

Most entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic. I’ve been working at startups for 15 of my 30 years, and I’ve seen a lot of companies fail outright or fail to reach their potential. That includes shutting down a fledgling business I started in 2001 because timing wasn't right for the idea. So believe me when I say I'm more pessimistic than most entrepreneurs.

It's easy to forget the details from 10 years ago, which is why news like Cheezburger Network's $30 million VC round sounds like a bubble.

10 years ago, a startup raising $30 million would waste much of that money on a Superbowl ad or poorly-targeted banner ads. Now, many VCs wisely forbid startups from using VC money to buy traffic. You can get a lot more value out of $100k on a top developer than Google ads.

Most well-managed internet sites earn a penny per pageview. Since the Cheezburger Network has 375 million pageviews per month, that's $3.75 million in revenue per month, or $45 million per year in revenue. There are a lot of smaller humor sites run by people who lack Ben Huh's pizazz and access to Venture Capitalists. He can use that money to buy up their sites and achieve economies of scale.

Many of the costs of starting and running an Internet business have decreased dramatically -- servers, bandwidth and software -- while potential advertiser dollars have soared. To illustrated how much has changed, take a look at these pages from the May 2001 eCompany magazine. Note the derision aimed at companies like Amazon, Buy.com, and Priceline that have arrived at sustainable and profitable business models.

7 reasons to switch from Drupal to Yii

Drupal 7 is about to be released, so many organizations need to decide whether to upgrade from Drupal 5 or 6. Drupal is fine if you're building lots of websites and need to create new sites quickly without much coding, or if you just need a blog-on-steroids content site.

Running on Drupal is like living in a double-wide: it's compromise if you can't afford a custom home. If you have a site that started on Drupal and has grown enough to employ full-time developers, you should migrate your site to the Yii PHP framework. (PHP haters can follow The Onion and use the Django Python framework, although it will take more time to change frameworks and programming languages.)

I'm the CTO of a site that switched from Drupal to Yii on April 30th 2010. It was hard to find information when we were debating a rewrite and there wasn't even a book about Yii yet. There were a few comments about switching from Drupal to Yii but they didn't include enough data to reassure me. I was worried that Yii might be slower than our heavily-optimized install of Drupal, so I decided to rewrite the core 20% of our site (which provided 80% of our functionality) in 30 days. It seemed like a great way to test the productivity and performance of the Yii framework, and if Yii wasn't an improvement after that month we could always switch back to Drupal and copy over any new data.

Yii was much faster than Drupal for our site with 150,000 nodes (each with a rewritten URL) and 50,000 visitors per day. Yes, we were working crazy hours for those 30 days (and the following 15), but it was worth it. The time that we previously spent working around Drupal's slow queries was put to better use, and it was a lot more fun to develop on Yii than on Drupal. The real benefit of Yii came later when we redesigned our site. With Yii's MVC, we only had to change 2 layout files vs a few dozen in Drupal.

I just wish we switched a year earlier.

Continue reading to see the 7 reasons

About Eric Kennedy

Hi and welcome to my blog. I started building websites in 1995 for Seattle's Thornton Creek Project.  That lead to a summer programming internship with a company called MetaBridge that pivoted many times: from building mobile software for the Apple Newton, to building sites for the then-closed MSN network, to building websites, and finally to a provider of web-based presentation tools under the name NetPodium.

At Yale I moved the website for the Yale Daily News off the yale.edu servers so we could have a dynamic website with images, searchable archives, an online store for Yale merchandise, and advertising.  I also imported 6,000 old articles from static files to extend the online archives back to 1995, although those archives have sadly been orphaned during a subsequent redesign of the site.

To help pay for renovations to the Yale Daily News building, I took a severly discounted programming job to build the website for Yale College Reunions -- my only pay for 9 months of work was a computer!  Amazingly, that site is still managing Yale's multi-million dollar reunions using my code 10 years after it launched.  The public interface is only the tip of the iceberg, as the site also includes hundreds of reports and internal tools.

I graduated from Yale with a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science in 2002 in the depths of the dot-com bust and decided to put off dreams of starting a company and instead learn more by getting a job. I worked at Expedia and Jobster and then reconnected with an Expedia collegue to turn RealSelf from a prototype into a site with 1.2 million monthly unique visitors.