Week 10

Day 64: Cluster

Monday, 26th January 2015 20:41

While at Techstars we’re in a shared space with more than just the companies from the current cohort. In the interest of fostering better collaboration and communication between the companies based there we’ve had a number of breakfast events set up for various business functions. I’ve already been to the developers breakfast, and there is a CTO breakfast in a couple of weeks¹.

Part of the discussion over the developers breakfast was the possible use of the open space we have at the office. As one of the organisers of nor(DEV):, a tech group based in Norfolk, I look at the space as the perfect venue to host speakers. This is exactly what happens each Thursday with the Techstars Founder Stories, so why not open it beyond that?

To test the theory we needed a guinea pig who’s willing to risk no one turning up in order to gauge interest in such an event. Not being shy when it comes to speaking opportunities I threw my hat into the ring. The net result is I should be running a 20 minute variant on my Ariane 501 talk² in the next week or two.

Keeping active on the speaking circuit has rather fallen by the wayside with everything else we need to do at Techstars. It will be nice to get some practice in before my sessions at nor(DEV):con, and events I have lined up at SyncNorwich and SyncIpswich.

Day 65: 15 seconds of fame

Tuesday, 27th January 2015 23:16

After blogging about our new NodeJS driver for Neo4j and receiving some traction I decided today it was time to offer it up to Hacker News and see what they made of it. For the briefest of moments (probably only seconds), I made it to position 21 on the front page, before sinking like a stone to languish on page 2 and 3. Not that I’m overly concerned, it was a “Show HN” post and I spent a good 5 hours in the top 5 of that page. The driver has had a number of visits and people seem to be playing with it and liking it. I’m attending a Neo4j meetup tomorrow where I’ll pimp the library some more and drum up more interest.

To actually be able to genuinely contribute to open source software, rather than just making a token effort, is one of the great things about working at Rainbird. I’ve no idea if the library will take off or not, but it’s there for people to use and it’s good to be able to give stuff back to the community.

Day 66: Connections

Wednesday, 29th January 2015 22:25

While the Techstars network is big, it’s not all encompassing. Sometimes you’ve actually got to go out there and make the connections yourself. That is exactly what tonight was about. After publishing our Node.js driver for Neo4j and making a bit of a splash about it, it only seemed sensible to follow up by attending this month’s London Neo4j meetup - which conveniently happened to be tonight.

This was an absolutely fantastic opportunity to introduce myself to the guys at Neo Technology, and talk to them about getting involved in the community, as well as get some answers to some of the questions we still had outstanding about Neo4j.

I was actually triple booked for tonight as we had company dinner that I wanted to go to, and there was a London Node.js User Group meeting tonight that I wanted to attend, partly because Codeship³ were going to be in attendance. Thankfully I was able to use the Techstars network to get Codeship to come to me tomorrow, meaning I’ll get to speak to them one on one.

Day 67: Flow

Friday, 30th January 2015 00:07

So things of late have been a bit flat. I’m tired. I’m swamped. I’ve been stuck since Monday trying to get a bit of code finished.

Today, on the other hand, has been brilliant. I’m not sure if it was the change of scenery with last nights Neo4j meetup, or just that I managed to get enough sleep to edge me to the correct side of exhaustion, but today just flowed.

Some code I had wrestled with for hours last night was rewritten and working within 10 minutes of getting in this morning. That put the finish line in sight and set off a cascade of little milestones and the completion of this chunk of work. This then freed me up to think about other things, and just plough through a bunch of really bitty, but important tasks. My To Do list is a little bit saner now and I’m itching to attack it further tomorrow.

The highlight of the day though was spending time with Florian from Codeship. We’ve been using Codeship at Rainbird since before I joined and I’ve really warmed to the platform. Getting to spend time with Florian meant I was able to understand how we could utilise Codeship to its absolute fullest. This has me very excited in a very nerdy way, and should also make some of the DevOps tasks I need to do easier.

More than that though, I was able to spend a good chunk of time with an experienced startup CTO and pick his brains about all kinds of stuff.

To cap it all, our demo day pitch is coming along nicely. Ben is doing a much better job of articulating Rainbird and I know we’re going to have an awesome presentation come the 20^th. Things just seem to be falling into place. It’s days like today that leave me wondering how I managed to land such a fantastic job. Cue the Lego Movie theme tune…

Day 68: 3 Weeks Left!

Friday, 30th January 2015 16:03

Less than three weeks left!

The Techstars Clock of Doom ticked over to 20 days and 23 hours left today, which means it’s less than three weeks to demo day. Given how fast the weeks are going at the moment that’s going to be over in no time, which is quite sad in some respects as I’m still enjoying myself.

Tonight, however, I’m not thinking about demo day, Techstars, or work. Tonight I’m going out with Ben, our CEO. This is part of the reason I’m posting early today. I may drink. It may get messy.

Ben and I get on fantastically well, which is helpful given how closely we need to work. Despite that it has occurred to me that we have never actually socialised in a non work capacity. Probably the closest we got was the Rainbird summer party where everyone and their families piled round to my house for a BBQ; but it was still a work do.

So tonight we’re going to have a non work night out where the discussion won’t be planning our next raise, or discussing development strategy, or indeed anything to do with work. Tonight we will go out, have fun and do whatever it is people do when they’re not working.

Day 70: Ex Machina

Sunday, 1st February 2015 18:13

I took a little break today to go watch Ex Machina at the cinema. It’s actually a very good film that makes it easy to look past the slightly implausible future tech and concentrate on the underlying themes that the film is exploring. I won’t give the plot away since it’s highly worth watching, however, it did leave me in a very philosophical mood.

Sadly this is the internet, and publishing my views on AI, machine learning, sentience, and the singularity - regardless of what they are - is just asking for trouble. It’s more a topic that is best debated in person, over a drink; something I’d be happy to do if you are ever in a position to do so.