William Steward's tech entrepreneurship blog - Latest Comments

I really enjoyed reading this! I don't really fancy University myself, and would love to start my own business. You've given me the confidence to make this happen :-)

Re: The Decision – It’s always better to make a decision than not make one at all

Anon — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:16:53 -0000

Really inspirational! Good luck with Pint Drop

Re: 5 tips to running a successful subscription service

Joel Gascoigne — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:47:06 -0000

Hi Will,

Completely agree with keeping it simple, not offering lots of different billing periods (i.e. keep it simple) and support the customers.

I am not so sure your first suggestion is the best advice for people out there getting started with their first idea. I think one of the best things people can do is to keep things extremely lean. The biggest form of waste in a startup is not a result of bad technology or bad billing systems - it is creating something nobody wants. I took this on board fully with my latest venture, and purposefully chose to start with a "bad" billing system. It was all quite manual - if they paid via Paypal I had to manually upgrade their account rather than it being an automated process. I could of course have implemented the full automated system from the get-go, but I had no idea whether it would be 4 days, 4 months or 4 years before my first paying customer. It is better to spend the time getting the first customer than optimising process which are only useful after the first customer. Luckily, it happened to be 4 days and of course now I have made it automated. This is really a matter of doing the right things at the right time, and about getting something out there as soon as possible to test the viability of the business. Even better, test the viability before you even have a product. I explained how I did this in my recent blog post which you might find interesting: http://blog.bufferapp.com/p...

I think overall, I would call this the "scale anticipation fallacy": The idea that if you don't have everything "ready" for high scalability right from day 1, it will crumble when you scale. This is of course not true. Take a look at Facebook in the early days: http://techcrunch.com/2011/... or Google: http://web.archive.org/web/... - quite sure they didn't plan for scaling to as big as they are from day 1 ;)

Thanks for a great post, made me think.

Re: My experience with Watir

Will — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:47:05 -0000

Hi Simon, thanks for responding. I'll email you the test case on Monday if that's alright. It's nice to know that there are people out there working on it, it's a fantastic concept and I'm sure with enough work it can be a brilliant tool.

Another thing I came across recently is:
http://articles.sitepoint.c...

Which looks like a pretty good bet too, so I'll be testing that out in the near future too.

Re: My experience with Watir

Simon Stewart — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:25:25 -0000

It'd be useful to see the test you attempted to run with watir-webdriver. We're working to make it better, and the more tests we have, the easier that becomes :)

Re: PHP Frameworks. Yes? No?

Will — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:26:02 -0000

Hi Jason,

Ah great, I'll have a look through the wiki. I was aware they had extensions etc, it just seems natural that those two items would be a bit more "integrated" from the beginning.

I mean these days most any web app needs authentication, and modular design is pretty common/a basic requirement too. So it seems weird that you would need an extension to do that, I appreciate that many people like to make their own auth classes, but why unneccessarily re-invent the wheel? When I compared the performance of the frameworks Code Igniter was a clear winner, I'll be posting a bit more about that later this week though.

Will

Re: PHP Frameworks. Yes? No?

Jason — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:05:09 -0000

Hey,

Nice Post. I have a few things to say. Firstly CakePHP has in my opinion some of the worst documentation around. I have tried to pick it up a couple of times but the documentation just seems incomplete. A framework is supposed to make things easier.. great documentation is a must.

I would also like to stick up for CodeIgniter. Firstly it is very simple. It is pretty much idiot proof. The documentation is complete, with examples and it is incredibly easy to pick up. http://codeigniter.com/user...

For those not fond of reading lots of documentation nettuts have covered codeigniter really well. Starting here: http://net.tutsplus.com/vid...

You mentioned authentication and modules. Both of these libraries can be downloaded from the codeigniter wiki.

Modules: http://codeigniter.com/wiki...
Auth: http://codeigniter.com/wiki...

I would check the forums on which Authentication library is the most promising as I use my own.

So far as Codeigniter goes I like it most for its simplicity, its large community, the documentation is great and it is really light-weight.

Of course CI isn't perfect. It still supports PHP4 and it seems unlikely that this will change any time soon.

The second thing that is a bit annoying is that EllisLabs is the developer. Codeigniter is the by-product of the 'ExpressionEngine' CMS. While this means new libraries get added as they are perfected. It also means that there isn't a dedicated group of core developers pushing functionality forward.

On the flip-side of this criticism it also means an ultra stable CMS which is tested to destruction before releases.

Good Luck with your exploration of Frameworks :)