ESource History

From ESource Wiki

Contents 1 Command line 2 Surfing the web 3 Computers as Tools 4 BROADBAND 5 Photoshop 6 College 7 My First computer 8 Microsoft Project 9 Networking 10 Fiber.net 11 The Mission 12 Post Mission Projects 13 Company Formation 14 First Linux Install 15 Service VS Product 16 Open Source PHP vs CF 17 First user authenticatioin 18 Contenet management Sytems 19 First Real Client 20 Invoicing 21 FRAMEWORKS 22 Under Cut Principle 23 Work VS Workers 24 Getting Work

Command line

My mom used to lock our computer with a password. We would spend a lot of time during the summers at the swimming pool, and playing on the computer. Kai and I have good memories of Jetpack. Making levels and trying to stump one another. I created a level that you had to run into a sliding ball, and your bloody carcus would slide on the ice to the finish line (door). He was never able to match my ability to trick, and strategies. Madden was another game we played. I played on the key board and I made Kai play with the joystick. Needless to say, I won every time. We used to play Sega Genisis when we were older, and Tekken 2. Sega Genisis, kais whole role was to throw the crack back as my tight end so I could take Emmitt smith around the corner on a 80 yard rushing touchdown. From that age kai knew his role... "keep the talent happy."

Anyways,we played and all kinds of weird games on the PC. I remember when the Allemans got a CD ROM for some Star Wars game, and I was like, "oh yeah?" because we were the ones with the best toys.

Warcraft 2 I think killed all other games. Doom and others we played with the neighbors over dial up modem.

I remember seeing the windows 95 boot screen and thinking the cloud splash page was so cool. I remember having to cd into directories. I remember having to type c:\win.exe to boot windows.

Surfing the web

The trumpet dialer and the early days of web pages. No google. Using the wayback machine [Link] you can look at some of the old HTML. I didnt realize at that time how much I would enjoy the internet. I rmember my dad telling me, one day your internet address will be more important that your phone number. I see that happening more and more with businesses. And people are giving out email addresses rather than cell phones.

Computers as Tools

Creating on the computer. My enighbor hood firends were reall artisitc. Durring Church conferences we used to get big peices of butcher paper and draw huge sick men war scenes. Tons of little stories all over the paper. We started drawingon teh computer using paint. Zooming into each pixel. I also had a fascination with scanning. I thought if you could get a stylist and a scanner you could do all your work on the computer. stylists never were any good. Amouse was way easier. we drew a shaded pciture of an orc or soemthing using the pencil tool on paint. I under stood pixels at a young age.

In later years I would start to see the computer as tool. I remember telling someone, that I was a dangerous guy on the computer. I could do a lot of damage! In my head I saw the computer and internet as an extention of my self. Tenticales almost. Today that is even more relavent becuase I feel handy capped without my comptuer. Spelling (google spell check) directions (google maps) anythign I know i can re google I seem to store in my "go google it" part of my brain. To this day I still google pizza hut or domines phone number each time.

BROADBAND

As we moved and teh kids got older my dad would buy new PCs and trickle them down so that people would stay off of his PC. we had a few LAN parties in the past so the ida of having a LAN party at home anytime we wanted was great. we had a DUAL ISDN line and that changed everythign as far as bandwidth. Plaing starcraft online was a huge part of my frowing love for computers.

Photoshop

When Imoved out to college, I met a friend who had been doing web deisgn since he was 14. He was 17 at the time. He showed me some techniqes how t make buttons, screws ect using photoshop. I told him thats what I wanted to be when I grew up.

College

I tool some classes at school, and was un impressed with the TECH side of the classes. they just tought us the applications for deisgning. Didnt teach us much about computers. I may have just taken the wrong classes

My First computer

The school had thes 200MHz PCs for sell for liek $200 dollars. My dad had free dial up with a 1800 number, so I got one. I took it home, and took it apart, learned the guts, bought some PCI modems and NIC cards. Setup a HUB and played Diablo 2 with a buddy of mine. I rmeember calling some stupid MS tech support guy becuase my Netowrking was not working. I remember him trying to ping, talking about a 7 layer burrito... Ito this day, I just know level 1 is the physical layer. Forget where I learned the rest from

Microsoft Project

I was at a break dance event and I hear a friend telling someone he worked for Microsoft. I thought that was pretty cool so I asked him where. Little did I knowit was the local call center had a support contract with Microsot to suppoort windows 95 and 98. I had 2 weeks of training and I dont remember learning anything. Next thing youkow I am on the phone taking support calls, looking up KB articles. I worked there for 8 months and got pretty good. Ended up losing my job for attending a break dance event with no more sick days. Go figure. the main things I learned there was, MSCONFIG, how to debug window sstartup. how often a winsock error occured. and that KB articles were usless. I leanred the basics on how to trouble shoot. I had this little nugget I still use today to see through the fog. The customer would call in, and give me a 15 min story about a dog, the PC, the power then its not workig.... I would tune them out. Once I heard silence, I said, so what exactly si the problem, and they say, my PC wont turn on. then I woudl start troubleshooting.

Networking

the networking video about a byte traveling around was very helpfull for some reason. in describing a router vrs a firewall ect.

Fiber.net

The Mission

I worked in the mission office a lot on my mission. They kept me in there becyase I was a leader and I could handle to office elders. Iw as an office elder back and forth.

I used to sit behind elder Abaham. Begging him to make a report for me. he would yell at me and say "Write down the mathematical algorythm for how I can calculate that, I bet you cant" That was his way of sayin, I dont know what Im asking for and we dont have a real way to accomplish that. So I had to learn it my self to get this idea off my chest. I practiced for hours.

Post Mission Projects

When I got home from my mission I got a job at MyFamily.com and I was part of the telemarketing sales group. I couldn stand how they had to update a spreadsheet every 30 mins. I wanted to make them real time. they wouldnt let me. But I found that I had port 21 open to the internet, and notepad on my PC terminal. so I went to work. i was customizing a theme for media wiki, for a family history site that went no where.

I was working with 2 associates from the mission. All 3 of us ended up going in different directsion. One I would work with again, the other, I wouldnt.

The Family History site was supposed to sell scrapbook paper. 12x12 scarp book paper online. The owner of that business went and designed his own paper, products, embellishments ect. He had them sitting in a warehouse for fullfillment. The problem? No one was buying from his site.

He called me frusterated one day. i said, lets try to sell one on ebay to test the market. Do people want to buy what you are offering? So he put an oterd on line. a set of 12 papers for $6... SOLD. He was so excited, he called me. I remember he was eating a sandwich. He said, this sandwitch tastes so much better bucuase I produced it. (meaning his sale was the $ he used to eat the sandwatch). He produced it. As allways I was still skeptical, that his pproduct had that much value, so he listed again... I called him the next day to see how the hits were. He said he went to the post office to ship the paper, and it cost him $7 to ship it. So a sale of $6 + $7 shipping killed his whole product. I thought, what a waste, we tried to sell his stuff in bulk with no luck. To this day, I think he just left the supplies in the warehouse, and they didnt know who to call.

Company Formation

During that time, I was working on a business name. I was workign at my family.com and hated my job. Iwas sketching logos, and thinking of names. I liked the e-something becuase it was techy... Our business idea was started by Phil. he wanted to do home Linux installs for $100 a piece. I thought ok, lets go open source, becuase all my expierience before that was pirated windows stuff. We made our business cards from a contact from the mission. I did a cheap website for a growing clientel type project. I was so excited to be able to put our logo on our shirts. The shirts were too small, the logo didnt stick out well, but we had shirts. Shirts/cards/website... we were ready for business

First Linux Install

The modem wouldnt install and Kai gave up. He had to go back to ogden. Deliver the Letter was not mixing well with that. I lost my temper and ran outside to tell kai what I thought of his commitment level. I pulled him out of his car, tearing his shirt, and threw him up against a fence and went off. I was yeling and screaming with as much anger as I had pent up from 2 years on my mission. Today I cant believe I did that, and knowing how much kai loved me, to this day I still feel bad.

But what I learned from that day has stuck with me:

1. Kai might not want to finish that day, but he will never really give up on eSource. But Allowing people to fail
2. Why not today and Why not both and Why not now principles are not a commonly shared principle
3. Linux is still gay about some things
4. I didnt think $100 was worth that
5. I needed to cool down

Service VS Product

I knew somethign service oriented would work. People are sure to pay for labor. Not sure how much they would pay, but they would pay. Service vs Product

Open Source PHP vs CF

I started in on my PHP, and had a small project from my roomate to make a data base drivven "build you own" furniture site, that allows you to pick a product/color ect and the image would be generated. I didnt know Java script. My feild names were "joe burnz" and "joe burnzz". that shows you how much i cared to make it complient. i was just excited to learn PHP. I used a IDBC cnnector and a MS access back end to manage all the CRUD/ I loved access because it build the queries for me. it was a visual tool to how qieries are assembled.

First user authenticatioin

PHP user Authentication

From the same contact as the Family history projects I was presented with a project. this was to be a webiste that allowed people to login, and buy a raffle ticket, and get a free coupon no matter if they won or lost. they would then watch a TV show (never happened) and if there raffle was called, they would be supprise with tons of gifts.

It was then I though, ok for $5k I will build this site. Thinking back now, it was the user authentication thing that was most difficult for me. I was using jEdit (still use it on occation). I loves the pinks and blues of the syntax highligheter. I googled and found a way to lock donw a page if a session was not set. i slaved over this. The partner was using Rapid CSS, and I was not a fan of table less layouts at the time. I came in one time when the site was half way done to recieve my payment. i remember he counteed out 25 $100 bills. I finished the site, and he paid my partner the other half of the money. I was pissed.

Contenet management Sytems

After the custom written app, I started to dabble in XOOPS. It was a content managmenet ssystem that was not very popular, but I liked it for some reason. I ended up makein about 10 sites, all for $200 or somethign pathetic like that.

First Real Client

I remeber calling Phil when we got our first client. it was a local PHP shop that had server problems.

My friend from the Mission got a job working as a rpoject manager for a web developerment company. they ahd server problems. Amature admins using webmin. They had vhost config files all over the place. That had 1 T1 line, networking issues, over heating issues. Computer naming scheme were the elemets of the Periodic table of the elements. I hated those names. It was like [naming a server] Aladin back when I wa s a kkid.

I was outside asking Phil, should we take it? My rate was $25 an hour I think. We tried havin gdifferent rates for me, kai and Phil. Me being the lowest paid, tier1.

All of us had full time jobs. this was ac rucial step in starting a business. Don't quit your day job was one of the reasons we were able to start the business. We had steady income, and could focus on teh business as we wanted to. Some of us focused more than others .. :) but we all shared the same dream of working with one another.

Invoicing

The real estate boom

Who will write our quieris? Ran, " We will"

Production Vs Consuming

FRAMEWORKS

knowing your are "re-inventing the wheel"

Under Cut Principle

In various situations in my career with outsourcing, you find your self in a situation where someone wants to leech onto the business. they want to bring in a client, or interface with the client in hopes to funnel some money through there pocket. In my opinion its like cutting in line.

What happens in those situations, is that the client and the real value are disconnected further. Like the telephone game, each time the instructions pass from one person to the other, things are lost in translation. With the Agile Process its all about communication and brining the client as close to the developer as possible.

Its the natural process then for the client and developer to want to talk directly. It begins to push the middle man out. UNLESS: the middle man is providing enough value/protection/processes that the client and the developer enjoy the middleman.

Work VS Workers

In contracting, or outsourcing, there is this concept called work vs workers. You want work to make money. You want workers to do the work. What comes first? The answer is that they come at the same time... if your good.

Getting Work

Currently I am not a big fan of marketing in general. Specificaly to my industry. But I do seem to bring in work. I will analyze how that has happened. I think its a true principle that people who ar elooking for something find it. Go read teh Sectret or something if you want. Sneaker Net is another term used that you go see poeople you talk, consistantly tell people about what you do.

Its been a few years scince this topic of "Someone in my ward built my website" was really true. More and more people are starting to find companies or providers to build there websites. more than ever websites need management services/patches updates.features. A valuable website never realy stops needing work.

Everyone has a website or a need. but not everyone has the money to do so. Start networking.

Follow the open your mouth princinples taught in the Preach my gospel book if you need more tips.

Good service/word of mouth are the best types of advertising.

Getting your first projects work like this:

You need a site? Ill do it for free. Once they see what you can do, you can squeeze some moeny frmo them as they start to see your services as an asset. They will then share with there network. Starting on a shoe string budget is a good thing. It puts your product on the moerket an see if people will trade currency for your services.