Weeknote #10

Customers is what happens while you're making plans. I've been doing a lot of planning over the past months but having our first customers proved that you can't foresee everything. Hopefully, you'll have set aside some time to revise your plans and do what suddenly became necessary. I didn't, so other tasks had to be put on the back burner -- more plans to change.

Although I've learned to do project management and organize my tasks, it's hard to fulfill my many roles. I'm company owner, manager, accountant, system administrator, business developer, marketing director and support representative, each of them trying to keep a healthy schedule and family life. That's a huge challenge.

On the positive side, working from home saves me time otherwise used for commuting that I can use to balance work and family.

Over the past few weeks, I've been working a lot, but I've also started to put in a free day every so often. That proved a particular good idea because it lets me free my mind from the urgent to focus again on the important.

One of those important things is friends. Taking a break from work to meet a friend over coffee or spending an evening together around a barbecue grill is a great way of winding down. It also gives me a chance at reflecting what and how I'm doing right now.

And, as it stands right now, I'm doing okay.

Velocity 09: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

Anatomy of a Stick Figure

Amazon Web Services jetzt mit günstigerem Cloud Storage

Wem die Vorteile des Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bisher zu teuer waren, bietet Amazon ab sofort die Alternative "Reduced Redundancy Storage" an:

We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3.

RRS wird ebenfalls nach Datenvolumen abgerechnet, aber zu geringeren GB-Preisen als S3. Dateien, die im Notfall wiederhergestellt werden können, können mit RRS also mit geringerer Redundanz, aber eben auch zu geringeren Kosten in die Cloud verlagert werden.

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.

Why I moved from LaTeX to HTML

As I wrote in my last weeknote, I decided to switch from LaTeX to HTML for the training manuals and papers my company Freistil Consulting will publish in the future. In this post, I'm going to explain why.

As a computer scientist, system administrator and IT trainer, I've written a lot of documents ranging from single-page articles and a diploma thesis to my book "Perl-Meisterkurs" with nearly 200 pages. And all the time, I've been looking for the format that best supported publishing those documents.

In the early nineties, I learned to like LaTeX. The process of writing documents in LaTeX (write, process, verify, repeat) is so similar to writing software in a compiler language that I found it very easy to learn. And its output quality was just stunning compared to all the text processing software like Word. Also, like for example with Perl, there is a huge choice of useful extensions, called "styles", freely available on the Internet. With those, you can use LaTeX for writing articles and books as well as letters and even presentation slides (or cooking recipes for that matter).

But while you can generate PDF files easily with LaTeX, converting a document into HTML for the Web is tedious, even with the converter software available. And because I needed printouts as well as web pages to display on a projector, I chose DocBook XML as my source format. It's been used for publishing technical documents for a long time and can be converted into PDF as easily as into HTML. Unfortunately, at least using open source tools, the PDF output is not nearly as neat as the one from LaTeX.

So, when I started writing my Perl book, I reverted back to LaTeX and I've been happy for some years. That is, until I decided to focus on online training. Now great print quality didn't matter that much any more and I needed HTML files to publish on our online training platform.

The format had to be based on plain text so I could still use Textmate, my favourite text editor, and Perl scripts to process my source files. There weren't much alternatives left to choose from. One of the most interesting candidates was Markdown. I already use Markdown on most of my blogs because it's easy to write and also easy on the eyes. Furthermore, Scrivener, the writing tool I like most, also supports working with Markdown.

And then there was HTML, simple, plain HTML. I got the idea from Mark Pilgrim's interview on the setup where he mentioned that he's writing his new book in HTML. I liked this idea because doing semantic markup in HTML is easy and by using CSS, you can style a great looking online presentation.

Writing HTML is almost as easy as writing Markdown, especially when you have support from your editor software. Additionally, there was the strategic aspect that if I wanted to involve other writers, I would be much easier to find some who knew HTML than ones with LaTeX, DocBook or Markdown knowledge.

Because I still wanted to be able to generate PDF files, I looked for decent HTML-to-PDF converters. XSL:FO was the main reason I abandoned DocBook, so I researched the alternatives and found PrinceXML. Prince uses the normal CSS styling information and extends its syntax a bit to cover printing aspects like page sizes and footnotes. I found out that CSS3 actually even can do page or figure numbering and cross references. It has to be mentioned that PrinceXML is a bit on the pricy side, so I had to do some tests first.

I quickly converted one of the book's chapters from LaTeX to HTML, created a CSS style sheet for screen and one for print media, and checked the results in HTML and PDF. As was to be expected, the web presentation was fine, and also the PDF output from PrinceXML was quite acceptable. These results finally convinced me to go Full Monty on converting the book from LaTeX to HTML.

I haven't finished the conversion yet, but thanks to a Perl script with a growing list of regular expressions, I can minimize my manual work. I'll also need to write some scripts for generating the table of contents and the keyword index, because PrinceXML doesn't do that.

I expect to have a complete new version of the Perl Meisterkurs book in May and will let you know of my experiences in another post.

Secret play room

via boingboing.net

Some parents really are awesome. Until this, I didn't see the use of owning a family home.

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…)

PIXELS

Weeknote #1 (week 14, 2010)

Whoa, only a few weeks in and already falling off the wagon? Those things are called "weeknotes" for a purpose, my dear friend!

Well okay, I've been pretty busy lately and the holidays with their parent-visiting didn't help. So, what's going in at the Freistil front?

Passion for starting a new business is one thing, being able to support your family is another. Since I don't expect our revenue to be huge from the start, I had to look for some type of funding that lets me keep paying for rent and food. Fortunately, the German state offers subsidies for people who leave or lose their job and want to build their own business. The downside: it's the state. Think beaurocracy. So, the week before Easter, I went to the Work Agency to submit my papers. Because I try to live the dream of a paperless office, I had all forms scanned in and later printed them out for my CPA or myself to fill them in. Now, at the Agency, the clerk politely explained to me that applications have to be submitted on the original form. And sent me back home. cricket So, instead of closing the deal, I had achieved nothing and that setback destroyed my motivation for the rest of the day. Productivity ground zero. Fortunately, I got another appointment two days later and delivered the papers right before the official went on her Easter holiday. Now it's waiting with my fingers crossed.

After building some clusters on Amazon Webservices, I tried Rackspace for comparison. Rackspace doesn't offer a service landscape as a big as AWS does, they're more of a VPS-by-the-hour shop. But at that, they seem to be quite good. Since our infrastructure is highly automated, we'll be able to use inexpensive Rackspace servers without much hassle where they fit in.

Getting all the necessary infrastructure in place takes a lot of my time. Frist, there are many parts in this puzzle of high performance and availability. And second, I often have to catch up with many software solutions I may have heard about during my management days but hadn't had the opportunity to put my own hands on. Because of that, I spend many days on the command line. Which is actually fun, but keeps me from doing other important tasks like website building.

So, I'm getting used to working long hours, or, like Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, to "crushing it".

And in the same Crushing Mode, I finished the Freistil Campus website on Friday night at 3am. Campus replaces the Moodle installation I've been using for online trainings. Based on Drupal, Campus will give us more flexibility to build the features we need for a great online training platform.

For the coming week, I hope to get the new hosting website ready to launch and for a positive verdict on my subsidies.

Warum ITIL oft nicht (komplett) umgesetzt wird

In einem kurzen Video zählt Malcolm Fry, Autor des Buchs “ITIL Lite”, einige gängige Hürden auf, an denen eine ITIL-Einführung scheitern kann:

• Kosten
• Fehlende Unterstützung durch die Kunden
• Beschränkungen (z.B. durch eine ISO-20000-Zertifizierung)
• Zeitknappheit
• Fehlender Einfluss
• Verlust des Antriebs
• Zu hohe Komplexität
• ITIL V2 bereits eingeführt
• Konflikt mit anderen Management-Initiativen

AWS Elastic Load Balancing bietet jetzt auch "sticky sessions"

Gute Incident-Kommunikation lindert den Schmerz

Am 1. April war den Ops-Kollegen der Amazon Web Services wohl nicht nach Scherzen zumute. Jedenfalls nicht mehr nach 3 Stunden Teilausfall im Amazon-Rechenzentrum an der amerikanischen Ostküste. Ich bin durch einen Bericht auf SearchCloudComputing auf diesen Fall aufmerksam geworden.

Bemerkenswert finde ich dabei zwei Dinge:

Erstens hatte Amazon die Krisenkommunikation, anders als bei vorhergehenden Störungen, offensichtlich sehr gut im Griff. Auf Blog und Statusseite gab Amazon ausführlich Einblick in den Ausfall und seine Hintergründe. Man gab dabei auch unumwunden zu, dass ein vorher nicht getesteter Rollout zu der Störung führte. Dem Artikel auf SearchCloudComputing ist zu entnehmen, dass diese Transparenz durchaus Lob auch bei den betroffenen Kunden fand.

Zweitens finde ich es interessant, wie spät der Auslöser korrekt diagnostiziert wurde. Zunächst vermutete das Ops-Team von Amazon nämlich einen Kapazitätsengpass und versuchte, durch zusätzliche IT-Ressourcen Abhilfe zu schaffen. Erst als schließlich klar wurde, dass auf jeden Fall genug Leistung zur Verfügung steht, verwarf man die Hypothese und suchte erneut nach der wahren Ursache. Diesen zeitraubenden Irrweg will Amazon durch genaue Analyse des Falls und eine geeignete Anpassung des Monitorings in Zukunft vermeiden.

Solaris nicht mehr kostenlos

IT-Automation mit Opscode Chef

Amazon vereinfacht Traffic-Abrechnung

Amazon Web Services hat die Traffic-Abrechnung ihrer Cloud vereinfacht. Heute morgen kam die Mitteilung per E-Mail, dass der Traffic aller Dienste (S3, EC2 usw.) jetzt nicht mehr einzeln, sondern in Summe abgerechnet wird.

I'm in awe

Weeknote #-3 (week 11, 2010)

Outsourcing work

One of the four essential activities of a manager is delegation. But how should a business starter delegate when they’ve got only a few employees, surely with enough tasks on their hands, or even no employee at all? Tim Ferris’ book “The 4 hour workweek” made me aware of another possibility: the Virtual Private Assistant, in short VPA. A VPA works for many clients who outsource ancillary tasks to them. They specialize in jobs that can be done via phone or Internet, like booking flights and hotels, answering emails and researching topics.

This week, I tried this kind of delegation myself. A friend of mine was looking for additional work, and I realized that, starting my own business, I could help her start hers. So I suggested to her to try and work as a VPA — I’d be her first test client.

I started with delegating the task of extending my social network by researching XING members with “Drupal” in their profiles. While I was busy working on my business concept, she started reaching out to new contacts, taking breaks when the system throttled her request queue. Early next morning, contact confirmations began pouring in. And with them, a lot of surprisingly positive and encouraging responses like: “Sounds interesting, we could cooperate on a win-win basis!”, “Please keep me informed because you meet exactly our clients’ hosting needs.” and “I’m happy to see you fill that obviously empty niche in the market.” Happily, I immediately assigned the next task to my VPA: entering the new business contacts into our CRM system.

In conclusion, by outsourcing tasks to a VPA, I not only saved time that I needed for other important things but also gained publicity and even more motivation to start doing serious business. Thanks, Tim!

REWORK

I finished “REWORK”, the new business book by 37Signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. In REWORK, they pick up where they left off with “Getting Real”, transforming their experience of running 37Signals for over 10 years into practical tips for business starters. What they describe is what I’d like to call the “4S” approach to business: “Stay Simple, Stay Sane”. In pithy language, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson make the point that you should always keep your focus on the business and especially on its outcome:

• Do without outside money, be frugal instead and keep complete control over your business.
• Work hard, but not like a madman; burnout doesn’t benefit neither your business nor your health.
• Go forward making tiny steps.
• Hire on talents and team fit, not on resumé and formal education.
• And if you’re not making profit after an appropriate time, it’s not business, it’s a hobby.

The book contains some things I consider common sense (but that’s hopefully from the lessons I’ve learned so far) and a few contradictions (what now, should I “pick a fight” or “ignore my competition”?). But all in all, the book’s a refreshing read and well worth the money.

Cloud-Plattform von IBM: "Smart Business Systems"

Special street maps

via niemann.blogs.nytimes.com

This is keyboard heaven, and Vince Clark is its god.

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!

It just looks like that

via aptgetupdate.de