I am a developer, sometimes sysadmin, I like to hack on different open source projects and every once in a while I write about what I do on my blog. At work I spend about 60% of my time doing Enterprise Java development but over the past 3 years I have increasingly found myself doing Objective-C. Over the years I have used a lot of different languages for work with the top after Java and Objective-C being C/C++, Javascript, PHP and Ruby. When I hack for fun I try to experiment with different languages but lately I've been using Ruby heavily.

Outside of work and open source projects I have been known to fiddle with electronics and RC cars. I have a family and kids so I also spend time going to baseball games, gymnastics, maybe some camping and helping with homework. Fitting everything in is a challenge but I have found that minimizing the amount of TV I watch frees up a lot of time. TV is probably the biggest time suck ever created.

In 7th grade my computer lab teacher discovered that he could write basic on the Commodore 64s we had in the lab. He decided to teach us to type by having us program simple games. From that point on I was hooked.

I moved from Basic to C after a few years. I think the early beatings I took from C made me a better programmer. I spent hours debugging programs before I really understood what I was doing. By the time I got to college I was well versed in tracking down bugs.

In college I had to switch to Pascal for a while but I convinced my professors to let me do my work in C after my first semester. Around that same time Linux 0.99 was finding its way on to some of the PCs in the main computer lab. A number of students who had friends at other colleges had started to play MUDs and they installed Linux so they could host dungeons. I happened to be in the lab one day while someone was trying to get a MUD compiled and I thought "Wow, the source for all of this is just out there for anyone to see and change?"

Looking around for MUD source led me to the open source world. I was soon looking at the source for UNIX tools and at the time it was a great match for my C background. I learned a lot by just looking at the tools and trying to figure out why things had been done one way and not another.

I start a lot of projects and then don't have time to come back to them but there are a number that I focus on. A couple of those projects are my HTTP live streaming segmenter and Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress.

The HTTP live streaming segmenter implements the pantos http live streaming spec. I used ruby for the project and it heavily leans on FFMpeg which is an awesome open source project. I created the project because Apple published a great spec for it but didn't release any source to actually implement it. This is a good example of a project that I started with no goal outside of building something and learning but later found use for in business projects. Over time a few commercial businesses have sprung up that implement the same spec, Transloadit and Zencoder to name two, but plenty of people still find my open source project useful.

The Google Analytics Dashboard plugin is something I started because I got tired of having to log into multiple places to see blog stats. It embeds a partial view of your Google Analytics stats inside your WordPress dashboard using the Google Analytics data export API. These days maintaining the project helps me keep my PHP knowledge from completely atrophying. This is a project I thought would die when Automattic introduced their own stats collection and display system but interestingly enough it became even more popular.

My favorite projects change a lot so this is a hard question to answer. Even though lots of people are paying attention to this one right now I think the project that has my attention the most right now is node.js. I find both Javascript on the server side and async programming interesting.

There are a lot of interesting projects currently using the JVM as a platform. The JVM is very solid, has a huge company behind it and there are years of knowledge built up on how to tune it. In the past I have played with JRuby and I’m currently playing with Clojure. My interest in Clojure is mainly to expand my learning into functional programming. I had some exposure to Lisp in graduate school but I never had use for it outside of the classroom.

There are a lot of things going on with performance through the web stack right now as well. I think Google's SPDY stuff is interesting. Even if it never makes it into the wide world I think it is making people think about doing things differently. There are a number of implementations in different languages, I'm familiar with node-spdy and the Ruby SPDY gem with the node-spdy being the most complete implementation I've seen.  On the other end of the stack there is a lot of work going on around responsive design that is interesting.

The first and most important advice is to do something, anything really. I help evaluate potential employees for my company and if a candidate hasn't pointed us to something like github or Google code I go searching. If I can't find code I search for any other contribution they may have made to a project even if that is just helping someone on a mailing list or on StackOverflow. The primary thing I'm looking for is love of the game and you don't spend hours working on or helping with an open source project without some of that.

My first contribution to an open source project was to Apache Tomcat in 1999. Back then I had to walk up hill both ways to get a commit! Today I don't like to hear any excuse about getting involved because it is so much easier for most projects. Github, Google Code, Codeplex, StackOverflow, etc have made the interaction effortless enough that there is really no good reason to not be involved in some way no matter how small it is.

If you are completely new then participation is probably the best starting point. You can participate by answering questions or providing opinions. It can be hard to get an out of the blue commit accepted into a project. I see a lot of people complain that they tried to contribute code and it was rejected or just ignored. That happens to everyone, right now I have two pull requests to large projects on github that have been sitting for months. Being part of the community around a project before trying to contribute code can help so it is a good place to start.

If you can make the time then participating in something like rails rumble or node.js knockout can be great. Coming up with something to do for the contest can help you think of ideas to hack on. Some of those ideas can turn into longer running projects and on top of that you will probably learn something new.

If you just can’t bring yourself to interact with people you can always start your own project. Fill a need you have, even if there are other projects filling the same need. There are at least two major WordPress plugins that do a lot of what mine does but plenty of people still find mine useful. If you can't think of a need then find a spec and implement it or find an idea that someone else has and make it happen or expand on it. Just do something.

We kicked off our developer chat series with super awesome Kenneth Reitz.  Today, we're bringing things a bit closer to home with our good friend Daniel Pritchett.  Daniel has been a friend of ours and a fan of Work for Pie from the beginning, and he's even helped us out with our recent LinkedIn Integration project.

If you'd like to get to know Daniel a bit better, you can find him on Work for Pie right here.  So, without further ado--enjoy!

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m a Memphis-based hacker with soft spots for Python, Ubuntu, and CoffeeScript.  For the past six years or so I’ve been a corporate business intelligence developer/analyst which means I turn large datasets into on-demand dashboards and pre-calculated reports.  When I’m not at the keyboard I’m hanging out at home with my beautiful wife and daughter, our dog, three chickens, four fish, and two hermit crabs.  This long hot Memphis summer has seen me spending the best of my downtime grilling and swimming.

What got you interested in open source? How long have you been at it?

I've been using open source tools since I landed at an amazing math- and science-focused residential high school in Alabama.  My roommate Jesse's dad was a programmer and so he was a pretty solid influence on me technology wise. We tried out all the Linux flavors we could get our hands on: Debian, ZipSlack, Red Hat, and Mandrake are the ones that come to mind.  Desktop Linux setup was rather involved in those days so I learned a bit about compilers, packages, and the open source programmer's toolkit.  For a long time I used free stuff like Apache with mod_php to host simple applications I'd download online to do things like index my mp3 collection and serve it over the web.  Jesse and I took a C and C++ class together in our senior year and that pretty well cemented my course for the next ten-plus years.

My open source mojo waned a bit after I took a Fortune 100 job that involved more configuration and drag+drop work than coding, but the past few years have gotten me back on track.  I think I can thank some of the other teams at Memphis’s second Startup Weekend (now 48 Hour Launch) for opening my eyes to a skillset that needed sharpening before I could really prove myself.  Since that weekend in 2009 I’ve gone from nominally knowing how to program but being unable to bang a web app together quickly and cleanly to finally knowing where my towel is.

You participate on Hacker News a bunch. Any tips on how to get started with that?

Hacker News is really a guilty pleasure for me.  There's a strong communal interest there in financial independence through either VC-backed startups or IT consulting.  There's also a focus on interesting technology, whether it’s software or hardware.  There’s really no secret to participation, you just spend enough time there to learn what the community is interested in and contribute accordingly.  Most of my HN karma is from comments.

Bottom line here is that it’s a great place to get ideas, a great place to learn how otherwise-quiet people on the cutting edge of technology are doing things, and a good way to distract oneself from real work.  Tread with caution.

What's the best way to start contributing to open source projects? How did you start?

The easiest way to contribute to open source today has got to be submitting a pull request on GitHub.  With a few clicks and a few more keystrokes you'll clone someone's project, change a line or ten, and then send them a gift-wrapped package with a "click yes to accept my changes" button.  Before Github I'd never bothered to submit a change to someone else's project.  Even now my favorite thing to do is spruce up project documentation - say by adding a well-formatted README and some links to relevant materials - rather than submitting code patches.  Over the past year or so I've been getting better and better with the popular Python and Ruby environments so I hope to begin submitting technical updates to others’ projects as well.  All of my own code on GitHub is nominally open sourced since that’s their price of entry for free accounts.  Even if GitHub’s not your thing, there are plenty of similar sites springing up in the “social coding” arena and you owe it to yourself to go out and find one that fits your style.

Any favorite projects you'd like to talk about?

There are so many fabulous open source tools that I use daily it's hard to know which ones to call out.  At the "can't live without it but rarely look under the hood" infrastructure level you've got sweet Xen-hosted Ubuntu virtual servers, my PuTTY and OpenSSH terminal clients, Apache web serving, git for source control, Pidgin and Chrome and X-Chat and who knows what else.  At the "these tools make development work a joy and they're top of mind while I"m working" level you've got Python with a souped-up IPython interpreter and some great libraries (Flask, Django, pip and virtualenv.  Ruby with a pile of gems (Sinatra, wirble, ori, and looksee make interactive development a lot more comfortable for me).  Generalbash scripting and cron jobs help melt away the repetitive tasks that spring up around any continuous development efforts.

Virtual servers are indispensable for the serious developer.  The sexiest tools out there are often born in a Unix-based environment and remain easiest to use in their natural habitat.  Maybe the good stuff gets ported to windows eventually, but if you want to walk out on the edge of new and fun tools - keeping your mind sharp and your marketability high - you need to go to the source.  Whether it's an $8/month private cloud server (my weapon of choice thanks to prgmr.com) or a locally-hosted Linux VM running in VirtualBox (free and fabulous) you can load up the best tools for the job in the environment they're designed and tested to work against.  Even Windows-land work can get a lot of mileage out of OSS and virtualization.  I've got cygwin and Ruby and Python on my office Windows 7 box and they get daily use. There are always going to be log files and CSV dumps that need to be mungedand remixed in valuable ways that their creators never imagined.  Check out the "Power of Plain Text" chapter in The Pragmatic Programmer for a better treatment of the power and flexibility of command-line development with open source scripting languages.

Bonus:  Do you think your after-hours work in open source helps you with your day job? How?

I touched on this a good bit in the last question.  On the internet, no one knows you're a dog, right?  They also don't need to know that your competitive advantage is a fabulous suite of free, world-class tools that can be connected together like so many Legos to bring unique and beautiful creations into the world. Help yourself to a free world-class operating system running on a free top-flight virtual machine with top shelf community-driven programming languages and see where the ride takes you.  The professional benefit of placing yourself in an open source environment is that you’re free to remove any and all friction from your workflow so that you make more forward progress in a given session than you possibly could have otherwise.  Being able to raise your professional profile through public contributions to software projects doesn’t hurt either.

Thank you Cliff and Brad for giving me the chance to answer a few questions. I’ve enjoyed following Work for Pie this year and I can’t wait to see where you guys go next.

Signing up for Work for Pie is a fairly simple process.  Give us your email address, input usernames or IDs from the various accounts we pull data from, add a few profile details and you're up and running.  We don't currently require authentication for these accounts.  Though this has been on our roadmap for a while, we're just not there yet.

This issue was pointed out quite publicly by Bennett Blodinger, who built his account by linking to accounts that aren't his.  He even made our leaderboard:

The fact of the matter is that right now there is no real benefit derived from having a high Work for Pie score.  Don't get me wrong--being on the leaderboard is awesome, and having a high score that you can show off a bit is awesome--but with regard to real, tangible benefits, there are none.  We don't share your information with recruiters or companies, and there aren't special perks that go to individuals with high scores.  Right now, we're just trying to build something cool for devs that allows them to highlight all the awesome work they've done.  We celebrate awesome OSS work, and we challenge folks to do more.  That's it. 

So, the only real consequence--positive or negative--of faking a high score by linking accounts that aren't your own is that you become singled out as someone who isn't very honest.  We truly believe that our users--pretty much all of them--are honest people.  You guys are awesome developers who are contributing to open source projects, often in your spare time and for no other reason besides your desire to make the world a better place.  Why wouldn't we assume that you are who you say you are?  What's the point of doing otherwise?

We do recognize that not requiring authentication could become a problem, and it's something we're going to remedy soon.  But until then our expectation is that you'll be honest. 

Our Terms of Service gives us the right to delete an account for any reason.  If you're dishonest about who you are, we'll do just that.  Bennett, since you're a special case we'll give you a day or two to link to your actual accounts before we take that action.  We understand your point, and we hear you, and making your point so publicly gives us the chance to address it in kind.  We hope you and the rest of our users are satisfied with our response and will be a bit patient while we build account authentication.  As you rightly point out, our ultimate goal here is to give rightful owners the credit they deserve. 

To the 99.99% of you who are completely honest about who you are and what you've done, thank you.  It means the world to us.  Honestly.

The Team 

Feedback is always welcome.  You can email us directly at cliff@workforpie.com or brad@workforpie.com.  Thanks!

We've recently updated our user profiles and would like to introduce you to a few of the fancy new features.  Check it out:

The overall look and feel is quite a bit different from our previous versions.  On the landing page we now have an improved bio section and a bio teaser that stays on the profile at all times.

We've also cleaned up the work history, education, and languages sections, and significantly upgraded the code section.  We separate original code and code you've forked from someone else, we've sorted your repos by your most recent contribution, and we've added drop downs that give you more information about each repo.

We've also added a score details section that breaks down your score into three categories (Code, Q&A, and Community) and shows how you stack up on a percentile basis vs. the rest of the community.

Loose Ends:

Blog - We'll soon be changing the focus of our blog.  We'll be providing some great content including interviews with some of our leading users.  We'll also be featuring some of the awesome code you guys have been writing.  If you'd like to be a guest or would like to hear from someone in particular or have a repo you'd like to see us highlight, please let us know!

The Strange Loop - We're a sponsor and both of us will be attending The Strange Loop in mid-September.  If you're coming out be sure to find us and say hello!

Tiny Disclaimer - The examples above are from real users, but don't necessarily represent an endorsement by them (well, we're pretty sure Brad is a big fan).

As always, thanks for being a Work for Pie user!  Follow us on twitter for news and updates, and if you have feedback or comments reach out any time!

Cheers,

The Work for Pie Team

We're winding down our time at Seed Hatchery, a startup accelerator based in Memphis, TN.  Our demo day is in 14 days.  As part of the preparation, one of the interns asked us to answer a few questions related to our experience with the program.   

The second question was this: "How do you feel that Seed Hatchery specifically has helped you with the seed money and the program?"

Here's my answer:

I got my MBA at Wake Forest University.  Great school, great people, and great education that set me up for a comfortable life in middle or possibly upper management.  I spent two years there.  Great two years.  Lots of beer.  But I've learned more, grown more, and gotten more great advice in 10 weeks here than I did in 2 years there. 

Here's why:  There were quality people there from whom I learned a tremendous amount, but it was all, to use the cliche, academic.  We were outside of the arena looking in, enjoying our beer and hot dogs while we observed the folks inside.  It was fun, but it was lazy.  So we went to entrepreneurship class and started businesses as an academic exercise.  We wrote business plans and talked strategy and did SWAT analyses and used some of our other course work to build projections and marketing plans and a huge pile of bullshit stuff that meant nothing.  Groupon built a billion(s) dollar business approximately the same amount of time it takes to write and publish one of those big textbooks we were lugging around.  We studied ancient history.  We worked through case studies on PayPal (early PayPal) and even Hewlett Packard.  And in the meantime we were all excited about this new thing called Facebook finally being made available to our college.  Curious... 

Now I can't say I didn't learn anything useful in business school.  I learned a ton, and the education I received there has clearly helped me in my current role as entrepreneur.  But we weren't in the arena.

Seed Hatchery is different.  Here, you're in the arena, and you realize it from the very first day.  You're not "given" $15K--you're charged with the task of turning that $15K into something significantly more substantial.  You're starting a company.  You're CEO, bitch.  On day one it's worth $333K.  You have to prove that, and then you have to make it worth some high multiple of that, in 90 days.  You're not asked to impress with your grasp of regression analysis or your incredible marketing plan.  You're asked to build a damn company.  Something that creates jobs.  Something that makes the world a better place.  Something that's so awesome that you'll have no problem whatsoever with doing it the rest of your life.  You ARE your case study.  It's no academic exercise. 

So what do you learn?  Well, you learn to deal with pressure from day one.  You learn to manage a team from day one.  You learn to lead from day one.  You learn how to take criticism, change on the fly, work smart and fast, build shit, talk a good game, shake hands and kiss babies, hustle, hustle, hustle, build business models that work, design, consult, do things in the cheapest and quickest way possible, be willing to change, be smart enough to know when you shouldn't change, keep your mouth shut, shout from the rooftops, do real analysis, be a CMO, be a CFO, be the janitor and the office manager, write financial projections that make sense, launch your product, get users, keep users, get more users, deal with press, find press, order t-shirts, order signs, find the right design team, figure out how best to spend your money, deal with tough love, deal with deep depression, deal with absolute elation, deal with zero sleep, use social media effectively, make the right friends, ship your damn product, make your damn product better, and somehow be extremely humble and the biggest badass on the planet, both at pretty much the same time.  Doing shit trumps talking about doing shit, every single time.  Every. Single. Time.

Of course it doesn't have to be that way, but it's exactly that way if you embrace it in the right way.  And it helps if you're a little "different" to begin with.

It's all true.  I can't say enough good things about our program and the strength of the leaders, the entrepreneurs, and the mentors who have helped us along the way.  We're not Y Combinator or TechStars.  We're #gritgrind.  We've got day jobs and we skew a little older and we don't have guaranteed TechCrunch write-ups and we definitely don't have 500 investors lined up at our doorstep.  But some of us are going to walk out of demo day with term sheets, and all of us will leave as better leaders, better entrepreneurs, and better people. 

So I guess I say all of that to say this:

Doing shit trumps talking about doing shit every single time.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Don't tell your mom I said this, but if you're young and hungry, learn to code, come up with a half baked idea, and apply to a startup accelerator.  If you've always dreamed of doing your own thing, do it.  Bootstrap it for a couple months and then throw your hat in the ring.  There are programs all over.  Most give you money, and many give you great mentorship, guidance, and tough love.  Doing shit trumps talking about doing shit every single time.

My company is called Work for Pie.  We help developers build portfolios that help them stand out from the crowd, and we give them a score, based on open source projects and community participation, that validates their talent.  We're still in private beta, but you can get an invite.  You can find us here: http://www.workforpie.com/

Seed Hatchery's website is here: http://www.seedhatchery.com/

And here's a fairly comprehensive list of accelerators around the world: http://launch.is/blog/2010/12/17/incubatorsaccelerators-by-deadline.html

Cheers,

Cliff

Hi folks!  Thanks so much for checking out Work for Pie.  There are quite a few exciting things to tell you about, and we've got a lot of great things coming, so hang tight.

Where we've been:

We developed the idea for Work for Pie because we wanted to give software developers a better way to showcase and validate their talent. We started with an algorithm based on user stats from Github, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News, and we're using that algorithm to give our users a score--ranging from 0 to 100--that validates their talent.  In addition, we give you an online portfolio that showcases your skills, work, education, and (coming soon) your code.  It's something we hope you'll share with friends and colleagues, use in your email signature, and even post on your personal blog or website.  We're going to be introducing features soon that make that easier, and we're working hard to ensure that your profile is both beautiful and chock full of substance.  We also think it's a lot of fun to see where you are, how you compare to your friends, and how your score improves over time as your meaningful participation in communities like Stack Overflow, Hacker News, and Github increases.

Where we are:

We sent emails to our first few users on May 5th, and opened the site up to many more of you the next morning.  We're so happy that you decided to get started with us early!  There were quite a few issues, especially in those first few hours.  We've been hard at work fixing bugs and listening to your feedback.  Please keep it coming.  Tell us what you'd add, what you don't care about, and especially any issues and/or bugs you find.  We want to make this something that you will use and share, and we love hearing from you about how we might make it better.

Where we're headed:

We've got a bunch of great features coming soon.  We'd like to tell you about a few:

Rankings!

We're going to introduce our rankings soon.  When you set up or access your profile you'll be able to see how you stack up compared to other members of the community.  We'll also have two different rankings on our homepage.  The first will be the top scoring members of our community, and the second will be a "hot list" of sorts, where you'll be able to see who's gained the most ground over the last week.  We hope you're looking forward to seeing how you stack up in both categories.

Code Highlights

To truly be a portfolio of your work, we have to give you a way to showcase the work you've done.  We'll be adding that soon, and we'll allow you to choose your best work to display.

A Profile for Folks with no Profile

When we launched, if all you did link your accounts and get your score, your personal profile didn't look all that great.  We're going to change that very soon, so the folks who aren't interested in doing the entire dance will still have something they can share.

Bitbucket Support

We hope to add support for several code repositories in the near future. First on our hitlist is bitbucket, so look for that soon.

A WYSIWYG Profile Editor

We realize that setting up the artistic elements of your profile is a bit tedious right now.  You'll soon be able to do that directly from your profile page.

Thank you!

Keep the feedback coming, and be sure to reach out to us on twitter (@workforpie) if you need anything at all.  We'll use twitter to announce minor updates and bug fixes, and we'll shoot an email from time to time to announce major changes.  Thanks again for signing up early and for sticking with us through all the changes.  We hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers,

Cliff and Brad

And we're off!

We had some fits and starts, and an extremely sketchy Wi-Fi connection, but despite the obstacles, we managed to push our private beta to about 80 of our very first users.  If you’re one of them, thank you for participating!

About our Product

Work for Pie, in short, is a resume replacement specifically targeted to software developers.  We take out all of the fluff that one often sees in a typical resume and replace it with real substance.  Your profile, or, more accurately, your portfolio, has everything a resume should have.  You can tell us a bit about yourself in the biography section, show us your work history and education, and even show us your skills, broken down by programming languages, frameworks, and tools.  You can make it your own by choosing a great background and playing around with several other options from font size to colors to transparency.  Finally, we pull information from a variety of sources and give you a score—a measurement of your talent as a software developer.  We’re calling it geek cred realized.

About the Score

To get your score, we look at your participation in websites such as Hacker News and Stack Overflow, and we also look at the work you’ve done on Github.  Your score can range from 0 to 99, and it will change as your meaningful participation in these communities increases.  We anticipate our scoring algorithm to change, even significantly so, over the coming days and weeks, and we appreciate your working with us as we continue to evaluate and improve.   You should also probably know that our scoring system is both open-source and participation biased.  This is by design.  The score isn’t for everybody, but it’s a great way to evaluate the talent that participates in these communities.  If your score isn’t quite as high as you expect, we highly recommend participating in communities such as Stack Overflow and Hacker News, and we also recommend contributing to open source projects via Github.  It just makes you feel good. J

Known Issues

This is a very early version of our product, and it shows.  It’s a bit rough around the edges, and getting your profile set up just right is a tedious process in this initial version.  It also doesn’t work so well in IE.  We’re aware of these issues and we promise there will be continuous updates over the coming days and weeks.  In fact, if you are one of our early users, we encourage you to help us drive new features and improvements by giving us feedback.  If something’s broken, please let us know.  If something needs to be added, let us know.  If you think your profile is awesome and your score is awesome and this is the coolest thing you’ve seen in a while, please, please, let everyone know!

So, bottom line is that we’re thrilled to have our product in the hands of a few users.  We’ll be releasing more invites soon, so tell your friends to sign up if you think what we’re doing could be useful for them.  And please hang on—we promise it’s going to get a lot better very soon. 

Other Cool Stuff

In addition to our soft launch, another pretty awesome thing happened today that we have to tell you about.   We’re currently in Nashville at the TN NEXT Conference where we competed with 28 other companies for up to $35,000 in capital.  We were one of seven companies who pitched their concepts to investors from all over the state.  Several of our competitors were from Memphis, including Cloud for Good, a cloud based software solution for educational and non-profit institutions; A Smarter City, which is using wireless sensor technology to improve parking and other city services; and Stiqrd, a loyalty card replacement that lives in your smartphone.   So, long story short, we won!  We’re honored to be recognized in this way, especially against such great competition.  Tomorrow (later today?), we’ll be competing with four other winners for the “big prize.”  We’ve got our fingers crossed, and we’re excited about the opportunity.

Thanks a bunch for jumping on the Work for Pie bandwagon early.  We’re building something great here, and we’re thrilled that you’re a part of it!

Cheers,

Cliff and Brad 

http://www.workforpie.com/