Part #2 of the thinking-out-loud-learn-a-new-language series (Part #1 here)

Ok, so learning a  new language is cool and exciting, but we’re doing it on the run here, full time job (and then some), 2 kids, 1,5 hour (split between 3 stretches) commute time two .. the works , so time is one problem and focus is another, so sort of getting it right from the start is important here. This means I should get some proper metrics and goals for this to work, that my choice needs to be as practical as possible and that whatever it is, it must add a new dimension to what I already know (syntactic sugar aside) and not simply be an alternative to, in this case, PHP.

So, a short list of things that should influence the choice:

1. I use Linux – of the Ubuntu flavor - so proprietary or OS limited stuff is, baring alternatives, out of the question (should I consider Objective-C ? .Net based languages despite having Mono?)
2. Needs to have a wider or different scope than that of PHP – i.e. mostly web of the HTTP flavor – doesn’t necessarily have to do EVERYTHING out of the box, but flexibility is smiled upon
3. Obviously needs to have good official documentation and I would appreciate some liveliness on future developments – stalled “We’re fine this way” languages lose points
4. It’s surrounding tools and infrastructure aspects again, should be available and relatively easy to setup – if the best language in the world requires a HPC infrastructure to get a “Hello world” running, it is most definitely out of the question
5. Must provide drivers and ways to connect to loose infrastructure applications (db’s, web servers, graphic drivers, etc)
6. while syntax and paradigms are not the complete goal here, it shouldn’t be a completely brainfck’ed up language (yes yes a pun there )
7. Having Enterprise written up, left, right and generally all over it is *NOT* a good sign , too

So, yeah, pretty wide criteria here, I might need to narrow the scope a bit, but it will serve me as a sort of checklist that I need to run against. While I will probably return to make the list better, I think I can start shopping around now

Any words on this? Comments? Have you done a similar process and wish to share your thoughts?

• Basic (o the Q, QW and Visual types),
• the Pascal ( the Turbo and the Delphi types),
• the ASM,
• the C,
• the C++ (I could point all the fun we had,but all I have are pointers to pointers and I left my deferring stick in my other pants),
• the PL/SQL,
• the ActionScript (the bleargh, 3 and Flex oriented),
• Ruby (oh my darling),
• Clipper,
• Javascript
• Java

But PHP as been my traveling companion, for no particular reason, from 3, to 4, to the very much welcomed 5 series. I enjoyed the wide support, the magnificent documentation, the easy entry level, it’s ubiquity, it’s presence in hosting services everywhere and having stick with it for so long I saw it evolve over time, bringing new constructs and features to the language (even if never doing away with all of it’s garbage) and while I can’t evaluate how fast or how intensively other languages changed, I was never truly let down by new PHP releases and what they brought along, or will continue to bring.

But still, I had other experiences, Ruby still plagues my PHP experience with it’s 100% oop approach to everything, I love the fact that you can write

"what, a string?".methods.sort

and know exactly what you can do with a string, alphabetically ordered just for my viewing pleasure , I loved how well the mixins worked and how gem’s coming in from everywhere and anywhere would just immediately mingle and turbocharge existing classes (yes, hello PHP 5.4 traits, I know you’re coming) . I used RoR – a bit after the “OMG It’s magic” hype went down, that sort of impossible-to-happen hype really brings out the irrational hate in me – and liked it a lot – I mean, when push came to shove, and complexity came into play, upgrading Rails became less and less easy / possible, without major rewrites (ohh 2.0,2.1,2.2 series), and it was always exciting too see Ruby apps panting with 400MB of used RAM while the equivalent PHP app was flying with 50MB .. but those are infra-structural details that have many strategies in how to overcome .

Anyway, while PHP will continue to play the lead role in my money making abilities, truth is I need to see what’s out there again, I have nagging friends who troll away with ease for my PHP choice of language, not that I put much faith into generalist trolling of the friendly kind, all languages have their ups and downs, and they’re not even bothering to use radically different languages, so I know it’s just PHP punkin’ around , but still, my synapses need the change, I need to experiment with different approaches and so, I need to learn a new language

But what should I choose ……….

(to be continued)

Anyway, my climb out of the hole continues and loose rocks continue to fall on me, forcing me to yet another change in course, so the roughness continues, but my need to bring my brain down to earth and make it more … productive, is increasing exponentially, it’s been 14 months since Child #2 came to be, and the time to do this is now.

This is also a post for myself, the information contained herein is close to non-existent, but it’s 2012, it’s time I have a blog, if you’re out there, thank you for being, don’t shy yourself out of pushing or kicking me in the back of my head, and let’s get this A.D.D. thing under control and see what kind of a human I am capable of being after all.

Onward, to business, life and community success and/or a big ball of fire

This is such a common question here and elsewhere that I will attempt to write the world’s most canonical answer to this question. Hopefully in the future when someone on answers.onstartups asks how to split up the ownership of their new company, you can simply point to this answer.

The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because “it was my idea,” or because “I was more experienced” or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you just say, “to heck with it, we can NEVER figure out what the correct split is, so let’s just be pals and go 50-50,” you’ll stay friends and the company will survive.

Thus, I present you with Joel’s Totally Fair Method to Divide Up The Ownership of Any Startup.

For simplicity sake, I’m going to start by assuming that you are not going to raise venture capital and you are not going to have outside investors. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with venture capital, but for now assume no investors.

Also for simplicity sake, let’s temporarily assume that the founders all quit their jobs and start working on the new company full time at the same time. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with founders who do not start at the same time.

Here’s the principle. As your company grows, you tend to add people in “layers”.

1. The top layer is the first founder or founders. There may be 1, 2, 3, or more of you, but you all start working about the same time, and you all take the same risk… quitting your jobs to go work for a new and unproven company.
2. The second layer is the first real employees. By the time you hire this layer, you’ve got cash coming in from somewhere (investors or customers–doesn’t matter). These people didn’t take as much risk because they got a salary from day one, and honestly, they didn’t start the company, they joined it as a job.
3. The third layer are later employees. By the time they joined the company, it was going pretty well.

For many companies, each “layer” will be approximately one year long. By the time your company is big enough to sell to Google or go public or whatever, you probably have about 6 layers: the founders and roughly five layers of employees. Each successive layer is larger. There might be two founders, five early employees in layer 2, 25 employees in layer 3, and 200 employees in layer 4. The later layers took less risk.

OK, now here’s how you use that information:

The founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer.

Example:

• Two founders start the company. They each take 2500 shares. There are 5000 shares outstanding, so each founder owns half.
• They hire four employees in year one. These four employees each take 250 shares. There are 6000 shares outstanding.
• They hire another 20 employees in year two. Each one takes 50 shares. They get fewer shares because they took less risk, and they get 50 shares because we’re giving each layer 1000 shares to divide up.
• By the time the company has six layers, you have given out 10,000 shares. Each founder ends up owning 25%. Each employee layer owns 10% collectively. The earliest employees who took the most risk own the most shares.

Make sense? You don’t have to follow this exact formula but the basic idea is that you set up “stripes” of seniority, where the top stripe took the most risk and the bottom stripe took the least, and each “stripe” shares an equal number of shares, which magically gives employees more shares for joining early.

A slightly different way to use the stripes is for seniority. Your top stripe is the founders, below that you reserve a whole stripe for the fancy CEO that you recruited who insisted on owning 10%, the stripe below that is for the early employees and also the top managers, etc. However you organize the stripes, it should be simple and clear and easy to understand and not prone to arguments.

Now that we have a fair system set out, there is one important principle. You must have vesting.Preferably 4 or 5 years. Nobody earns their shares until they’ve stayed with the company for a year. A good vesting schedule is 25% in the first year, 2% each additional month. Otherwise your co-founder is going to quit after three weeks and show up, 7 years later, claiming he owns 25% of the company. Itnever makes sense to give anyone equity without vesting. This is an extremely common mistake and it’s terrible when it happens. You have these companies where 3 cofounders have been working day and night for five years, and then you discover there’s some jerk that quit after two weeks and he still thinks he owns 25% of the company for his two weeks of work.

Now, let me clear up some little things that often complicate the picture.

What happens if you raise an investment? The investment can come from anywhere… an angel, a VC, or someone’s dad. Basically, the answer is simple: the investment just dilutes everyone.

Using the example from above… we’re two founders, we gave ourselves 2500 shares each, so we each own 50%, and now we go to a VC and he offers to give us a million dollars in exchange for 1/3rd of the company.

1/3rd of the company is 2500 shares. So you make another 2500 shares and give them to the VC. He owns 1/3rd and you each own 1/3rd. That’s all there is to it.

What happens if not all the early employees need to take a salary? A lot of times you have one founder who has a little bit of money saved up, so she decides to go without a salary for a while, while the other founder, who needs the money, takes a salary. It is tempting just to give the founder who went without pay more shares to make up for it. The trouble is that you can never figure out the right amount of shares to give. This is just going to cause conflicts. Don’t resolve these problems with shares.Instead, just keep a ledger of how much you paid each of the founders, and if someone goes without salary, give them an IOU. Later, when you have money, you’ll pay them back in cash. In a few years when the money comes rolling in, or even after the first VC investment, you can pay back each founder so that each founder has taken exactly the same amount of salary from the company.

Shouldn’t I get more equity because it was my idea? No. Ideas are pretty much worthless. It is not worth the arguments it would cause to pay someone in equity for an idea. If one of you had the idea but you both quit your jobs and started working at the same time, you should both get the same amount of equity. Working on the company is what causes value, not thinking up some crazy invention in the shower.

What if one of the founders doesn’t work full time on the company? Then they’re not a founder. In my book nobody who is not working full time counts as a founder. Anyone who holds on to their day job gets a salary or IOUs, but not equity. If they hang onto that day job until the VC puts in funding and then comes to work for the company full time, they didn’t take nearly as much risk and they deserve to receive equity along with the first layer of employees.

What if someone contributes equipment or other valuable goods (patents, domain names, etc) to the company? Great. Pay for that in cash or IOUs, not shares. Figure out the right price for that computer they brought with them, or their clever word-processing patent, and give them an IOU to be paid off when you’re doing well. Trying to buy things with equity at this early stage just creates inequality, arguments, and unfairness.

How much should the investors own vs. the founders and employees? That depends on market conditions. Realistically, if the investors end up owning more than 50%, the founders are going to feel like sharecroppers and lose motivation, so good investors don’t get greedy that way. If the company can bootstrap without investors, the founders and employees might end up owning 100% of the company. Interestingly enough, the pressure is pretty strong to keep things balanced between investors and founders/employees; an old rule of thumb was that at IPO time (when you had hired all the employees and raised as much money as you were going to raise) the investors would have 50% and the founders/employees would have 50%, but with hot Internet companies in 2011, investors may end up owning a lot less than 50%.

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, but anything you can do to make it simple, transparent, straightforward, and, above-all, fair, will make your company much more likely to be successful.

It is publishing. It is humanity. It is the vanguard of ideas clashing against the rearguard of commerce. This is not new. This is all to be expected. We must stop raising our eyebrows and chuckling at it. We must decide to accept the world as it is, or to roll up our sleeves and help.

I’ve disengaged my Irony Filter on this one and I might be looking at a intent that isn’t there, but read the full article, the wider subject / behavior is something that has constantly made my skin crawl, my nails fall and my teeth shatter. I hate snobbishness, I hate pretentious people who are to good to actually do some work, but are perfectly capable of skimming through the result of weeks of hard work and, holding their nose up high, diminish it via accessory comments that orbit the important matter as if they were Pluto orbiting the sun (yeah yeah, pretty snob myself here ), unable however to produce any better themselves, let alone help instead of bashing … but anyway, I digress at my own black bile, I let a better man say it

Votar na Web – roughly Vote Online

This is a Brazilian based project done by WebCitizen and presented by Fernando Barreto, a co-founder. The website‘s purpose is to present the Brazilian Congress proposals, make a Human Readable Summary, give you some metadata – who proposed it, what sort of proposal, when it was proposed, etc – and allow you, the website user, to comment and vote Yes or No on the proposal. When the actual voting is done by the congress the data gets updated and you can compare the “people’s” choice with the actual politicians. It also gives you with information about each politician, what they proposed, how they voted AND, based on your choices, it shows your affinity to individual politicians.

I really like the visualization and the work they into changing the language used in the proposals to a more readable form – laws act like their done so a machine can read then, but it’s made by humans for humans, they should be clear, not faux algorithmic. The geographic distribution of voters is interesting, even if I’m naturally put of by the comments, not so much for the popular voting (even if it really doesn’t tells us much – it’s pure voting, lacks representation and other tools to be meaningful), but even if it does mean Trolls will have a field day if they choose to, it DOES motivate people to participate and be more aware of what’s going on and what’s being decided and, for really interested politicians (or just smart ones) it’s a source of information regarding people’s opinion – and yes, the comments might even bring contextual information to individual bills if used correctly.

It actually runs relatively low numbers, I think they talked about 20k votes, for a country as big as Brazil it’s a very small number, but it has room to grow, and it sure deserves the praise.

Landshare

I MISSED THIS ONE, I’m hoping the video is made available – it was a skype call too – but I still want to share the website as it seems like a very very interesting project.

Landshare brings together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food. Since its launch through River Cottage in 2009 it has grown into a thriving community of more than 55,000 growers, sharers and helpers.

It’s for people who:

• Want to grow their own fruit and veg but don’t have anywhere to do it
• Have a spare bit of land they’re prepared to share
• Can help in some way – from sharing knowledge and lending tools to helping out on the plot itself
• Support the idea of freeing up more land for growing
• Are already growing and want to join in the community

It began with the tiny seed of an idea – and it’s growing and growing.

This is the sort of thing that really gets to me, since starting to buy my vegetables fresh from the earth’s mouth (so to speak) directly through local producers and recognizing the enormous difference in quality and flavor from the Supermarket version, and relearning about the seasons for vegetables and fruits (365 cultures – not that great) that local grown products have gained importance for me. The fact that these guys provide a platform for people who want to provide the labor can use the land other people have and are willing to facilitate makes perfect sense and will make more sense in the near future, with all the turmoil the World finds itself in. I’ll want to review the site and possibly the session video, but I wanted to bookmark it here, for future memory

So, I’ve been trying to get of some personal holes / habits I had (or still have, inertia applies to any sort of movement change), one of the ongoing issues is my apply-anywhere procrastination, I entertain ideas, a lot of them, but I never give the Real Life Out of Brain step to do anything about them. This has been happening for too long, way too long, and while have no illusions bad habits die hard, it’s something I actively dislike and am trying to fix – like blogging more often .

Having said this, cooking, I love food, it’s something I extract pleasure from, so having some independence over it’s manufacturing process was a logical step forward, so I went in search of a non habitual recipe that was easy enough for an utter amateur – no amount of general knowledge or tv shows viewed can change that. Looking at the available in-house food, something with chickpeas and curry seemed obvious so a recipe was discovered and the manufacturing process carried out. A non perfect dish was produced – looks good but the taste was flatter than expected – bellies were filled and a couple of humans were made happy – it’s something I intend to repeat, eating is part of life so it’s a natural task, it’s not revolutionary but it puts me in a track, heck, I even reorganized the kitchen – producing mix feelings in the household female counterpart

Anyway, I recommend both the recipe and the process, kitchen work is very life like, you need to organize yourself, you need prepare ingredients, chop them up, line them in order of appearance, and when that non stressful procedure is done, you ignite the fire and you enter a real-time / you can’t miss this or all is lost stage, and it’s stressing and invigorating, and while it isn’t dangerous, you do put your meal at risk – we had sausages standing by, just in case – and it’s .. interesting

As for the recipe, check it here, it’s in Portuguese but it’s not like that should stop anyone . Follow this space, there will be more

Anyway,for a while I was depending on Exifer to extract the information out of the files and it was enough for the image files I used (“old” Canon RAW files and JPG’s) but recently I used a Canon 30D for a day and those pesky CR2 files where confusing Exifer (who is mostly dead for a few years from what I gather) . So I had to drag my all to lazy ass around and look for alternatives and, sure enough, Core PHP has our back with the Exif module. “Yay” I said, and so I calculated the shortest path to get it running instead of Exifer, did it, tried it, loved it, commited it, pushed it and now I blog about it

My next trick is two fold:

1. I need a serious refactoring to the information gathering process, I’m doing it upfront leaving the copying for later, and that obviously has some issues – like over usage of memory for large file sets.
2. Let the user choose the folder scheme you want, I’ll have a look at what interesting Exif information I can expose and let you configure things for yourself

“Yay” I said a second time – and promptly published the post and exited the room.

Installing the PECL D-Bus extension

sudo pecl install channel://pecl.php.net/dbus-0.1.1

Write some php (dbus.php)

<?php

$DBus = new Dbus( Dbus::BUS_SESSION );

$DBusProxy = $DBus->createProxy
    (
        "org.gnome.Shell", // connection name
        "/org/gnome/Shell", // object
        "org.gnome.Shell" // interface
    );

$DBusProxy->Screenshot("/tmp/test_php.jpg");

Run it

php dbus.php

Yay or nay, have fun

This quick example should – If all the stars align and your current Operating System actually has D-Bus and Gnome Shell installed – take a quick snapshot of your desktop, now, it wasn’t impressive (not by a long shot), but it was something I randomly picked using D-Feet to test the extension and lo and behold, it worked, like a charm, the first time. What more can we ask

We’ll be back, I just wanted to dump this info here

Delete a remote branch

$ git push <remote> :<branch_name>

Delete local branch (obvious, but let’s group things)

$ git branch -d <branch_name>

Clean up your local repository of all those deleted remote branches

$ git remote prune <remote>

Now go be a happy little hu-man