View of the crowd from the fish-eye crowd-cam.

BrightMix proudly sponsored (and ate many of) the Starbursts.

Marlina and Dusty posing for the camera in front of the big Big Omaha.

Jeff and Dusty on the stage kicking off the day’s activities.

Erin #2 putting the finishing touches on the “Where are you from? Where were you born?” map.

The BrightMix team (sans Kevin) poses in front of the giant foam Big Omaha.

Dusty and Jeff with all of the Big Omaha speakers.

Last but not least, even Bentern (and Nick) got in on the action as a bouncer outside the front door of the Kaneko.

I’m sitting on a plane (yay offline GMail!) on my way back from a last minute mini-vacation to San Diego for 4 days. Since starting the business nearly 2 years ago, I’ve not had much in the way of time off, let alone a full-fledged vacation. Its funny, because though we emphasize a healthy work-life balance for our employees, Kevin & myself rarely if ever take time off.

This trip came at an amazingly hectic time, as we’re launching a few sites and applications, we’ve got a new employee starting in a week, we’re doing construction on the office, and any number of other reasons. However, if you sit back and look at it, you soon realize that as a business owner there never is a great time to be gone. So, we decided to unplug for 4 days, and let the smart and talented folks back at BrightMix keep the ship afloat.

Sadly, I’ve long been of the belief that taking vacation means 2 things…

You work extra hard before you go, and extra hard after you return, and ultimately the time off is a wash.

Regardless of the stresses that are happening at the office, and the work it will take to get “caught up”, there are an amazing number of things that vacation can help with

• Unplugging from technology is good for the brain – Like a lot of people, I’m completely addicted to my Blackberry, which includes both email and Twitter. Its a very liberating feeling to shut off the email notification, and just spend a few days without the incessant buzzing and interruption of the phone. Perhaps I’ll carry some of this back to the “real world” with me.
• Preventing divorce – Joking.. sort of. Its good to spend time with your significant other, especially when most of the time they play second fiddle to the demands of the business. Four days on the beach and some fancy dinners can do wonders in this department!
• Reflect on the state of the business. Too often we get caught up in the daily grind — software, deadlines, quality assurance, bugs, billing, etc — and lose site of where we want to be as a business. Things like “are we building the type of company that we want to build”, and “are our employees truly happy”, and “are WE truly happy”. These are all things that all-too-often get pushed aside to the demands of clients and the business. Taking a step back is a great way to refocus on the things that matter.
• Have some fun! – For me, there’s nothing like sitting on the beach, or drinking margaritas and watching people, or just wandering around a new city. Whatever your definition of fun is, its good to do it from time to time : )

At the end of the day, I’m coming back refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to (in the parlance of GaryV) — CRUSH IT.

It was a good crowd of people, from diverse technology backgrounds, many of whom I’m sure had not heard of many of the technologies that I spoke of. I gave the list in Top Ten format, and here are the list of 10 things that we use as a company to get things done.

#10 – Campfire
#9 – Mozy
#8 – Google Voice
#7 – Skype
#6 – Quickbooks … NOT!
#5 – Freshbooks
#4 – Blogs, Twitter, Facebook
#3 – Google Docs
#2 – Google Calendar
#1 – Gmail (specifically Google Apps Mail)

Here’s the slides from the presentation as well…

I forgot what I planted here.

Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes.

Bell pepper. The end.

Hello World,

I am the Bentern, the Brightmix intern.  For the past six weeks I have been working out of the Brightmix international headquarters here in Omaha working on a project of my own.  I came up with my idea originally as a programming challenge for myself and it quickly progressed into what I think will be a pretty nifty website and business.  Yes, nifty.

Working on the idea has definitely had its own set of challenges, yet has been enjoyable.  I have a deadline of June 30th to get a very alpha version of the site up and running and I think I’m going to make it.  However, there have been some early mornings and long nights.  And lots of biking.  I bike to work.  I never realized how many large hills there are here in Omaha.  If you see a kid completely out of breath on first gear riding up California/Underwood in the morning, that would be me.  I appreciate any encouragement you’re willing to yell from your car window.

Anywho, much has been done in six weeks.  Everything that has been so far definitely could not have been accomplished without the ongoing support from the Brightmix crew who have provided mentoring, design concepts, hilarity, and many other things.  They also feed me from time to time, which is GREAT.  I am embarrassed to say that I am your typical starving college kid.  If you would like to donate food to me, that would be really, really sweet.

I’m not going to go into specifics on my concept for various reasons just yet, but soon enough you’ll see some cool stuff.  Believe me, I really want to tell you all what its all about but it has to remain covert for right now.  Feel free to say ‘whassup’ in the comments or swing by the office or whatever way you feel like saying ‘whassup’ to me.  I’ll be working like crazy the next nine eight days to meet the deadline.  Wish me luck!

Keep reading the Brightmix Blog for specifics throughout the Summer!

We’ve been in the news quite a bit recently, and have been lax on tauting these happenings to the blog. Most recently, this past Saturday I was quoted in the Omaha World Herald in a story about the coworking project that we’re helping to spearhead called Jailbreak Omaha.

Jailbreak is a hybrid coworking / incubator / cool space, with an emphasis on fostering collaboration and building community amongst the people involved in the space. Unlike your typical incubator, this place will be very “cool” and “hip”. Think Google or Pixar. The goal is for it to be the type of place that people actually want to go to..

From the article…

Co-working involves individuals and small companies sharing office space to save money and exchange ideas. The concept is gaining popularity among freelance workers and independent designers across the country, said Dusty Davidson, one of the project’s coordinators and co-owner of Brightmix — a small Omaha-based Web development company.

So Davidson and other project coordinators, including Jeff Slobotski of Silicon Prairie News, decided to open a co-working space in Omaha. They want to bring “the coffee shop crowd” together to work and to collaborate, Davidson said.

Unlike your typical stuffy executive suites or incubator spaces…

Davidson said Jailbreak will be more than just shared office space.

“It’s about building community and fostering collaboration.”

The Jailbreak community could be leveraged to build entrepreneurial spirit among participants, he said.

Jailbreak would not be the first small-business incubator in Omaha, but it would be the first to combine the functions of a traditional incubator that offers subsidized space and other resources with a level of collaboration that is typically associated with co-working spaces, he said.

“The goal is to be a beacon for entrepreneurs in and around Omaha,” Davidson said.

You can read the full article at Omaha.com (hopefully it stays up for more than 7 days). Stay tuned for LOTS more information about this project in the coming months..

After a most “amazing” Cupcake Party, BrightMix has officially declared 2009 the year of the dessert-themed party. For our next bash, we’re hosting an ice cream social for the ages. It will be like nothing Leavenworth Street has ever seen before! We’ll have ice cream, bowls, spoons, and drinks. We’re counting on you to bring some creative toppings…..and to eat copious amounts of ice cream.

So grab your iPhones, and tell your friends. Most importantly, join us after work on July 31st for an amazing time.

Leave us a comment if you plan on stopping by!

Update! We’ve filled this position – thank you to all who applied. Be sure to check back here for more positions in the future!

We’re looking to hire another software developer to join our company. Take a minute to read this post and see if you meet our qualifications and are interested in working with us.

This position is for full-time employment, and we are looking to hire long term.  This job will be geared towards you if you are fresh out of school, close to being done with school, or don’t have a whole lot of official experience in programming.

We are generally looking for candidates who have a programming-related degree (computer science, etc.), but we won’t hold it against you if you don’t have one. That being said…

Official Job Requirements

• You really, really seriously enjoy coding – web coding in particular.
• You are able to take ownership of a project and meet deadlines.
• You are open to doing things outside of writing code on occasion (i.e., fetching coffee for Erins).
• You are professional, disciplined, focused, but able and willing to have fun at work.
• You have a track record of doing exceptionally well at whatever it is you’ve done in the past.

You’ll Stand Out More If You…

• Have played around with or used Ruby on Rails, .NET, Php, HTML, and CSS.
• Read programming blogs and/or books (impress us more by guessing some of our favorites).
• Have your own blog and post about coding-related things.
• Have created cool programming projects outside of work and school.

What Will You Work On?

You can expect to work exclusively on web-based projects (some project examples here) using ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, and PHP. Along with that, you’ll get to do a lot of stuff in MySQL/SQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScripting.

We always tend to work in the latest and greatest versions of each platform; we like to stay on the bleeding edge of web technology.

Good Times at the Bowling Alley

Will I Learn Lots of Good Stuff?

Oh you betcha. On the technical side, you’ll learn web coding in all of the aforementioned languages, how to design and manage databases, and how to work with designers to give your website the “bling bling” factor.

Outside of that, you’ll learn some shocking things about: client relations, running a small business, foosball and darts, and how to party, brightmix-style. 

Why BrightMix?

Here’s the deal: we want to find someone who fits into our company just as much as you’re looking to find a great place to work – a place that doesn’t suck.

Your Work Environment and the People You Work with Matter

We boast a colorful and comfortable office space in mid-town, and we’re working hard to make it a great place for developers to work. You won’t find any cubicle farms, water coolers, or TPS reports here.

We don’t have a complex command structure, either. You’ll get to work directly with the founders of the company and the Erins. We’re pretty friendly and fun peeps, and we promise not to boss you around too much. We’re also developers (excluding Erin #2), not clueless, spikey-haired middle managers, and we’re avid followers of the business philosophies of people/companies like Joel Spolsky, 37 Signals, and Eric Sink.

BrightMix Halloween Pumpkin Carve

You will Receive the Following

• Competitive pay
• 3 weeks paid time off
• Health Insurance stipend
• Flexible hours and ability to work from home
• Retirement account (401k)

Additional Neat Things

• Free soda and snacks of your selection
• Semi-frequent company outings (lunches, golfing, bowling, etc.)
• Fun work environment (Foosball, darts, drinks, video games)
• Fancy equipment: MacBook Pro, 24” monitors, speedy Desktop PC

Still Interested?

Think this job has your name on it? To apply, send an email to jobs@brightmix.com and tell us a little about yourself, including why you think you’d be a good fit at BrightMix. Be sure to attach a copy of your resume, and include any relevant URLs (blog, websites, past projects, portfolio’s, etc).

We look forward to hearing from you!

Advantages of EC2

We chose EC2 primarily because it would give us the ability to have automated and cheap server scaling. Specifically, you can create and shut down server instances through the EC2 API. This allows you to programmatically scale your web application from zero to any number of servers based on necessity (if you got techcrunched, for instance, you’d probably need a lot) and you only pay for what you use. If you’re interested in more details about EC2 scaling, check out Dusty’s presentation.

Other good things about EC2:

• Ability to build an image (AMI) of an existing instance. Once built, you can create any number of clones of your existing instance in just a few minutes. Since it’s a copy, you don’t have to install OS libraries, packages, patches, or otherwise on the instance. Very groovy.
• Very active developer community around hosting on EC2. There are a lot of people using EC2 and building stuff around it.
• It’s very affordable and competitively priced. One small EC2 instance runs about $100/month if you keep it on all the time.

Drawbacks and Disadvantages of EC2

Here are a few of the disadvatanges we’ve seen and experienced with EC2.

Server Configuration Woes

As it turns out, it can be a real pain in the ass to set up and configure a Rails app in the cloud all by yourself. We leveraged a really sweet Rails plugin called EC2OnRails, which automates the setting up an EC2 instance for Rails hosting. EC2OnRails, doesn’t, however, help you do any sort of automatic dynamic scaling. For that, you’d need to go for something like Scalr or RightScale.

Unrecoverable Instances

If you manage to mess up your instance’s boot sequence, networking or routing configurations, or SSH server, you can easily exile yourself from an instance. More specifically, you won’t be able to log into it and fix whatever you broke. Your only options are to get support from Amazon (generally unreliable and slow from our experience) or build a new instance. Yeah, I had this happen to me a few times – one time in particular it was as a result of installing some innocent Ubuntu OS updates. That was a real bummer.

Random Loss of your Instances!

We’ve never had an instance vanish on us; we’ve actually had a few instances that have been running for upwards of a year now. However, there is always the looming possibility of one just going poof and being gone forever. So, if you want to roll in the EC2 cloud, you need to be able to quickly rebuild a lost instance.

What Caused us to Move Tripleseat

When we launched Tripleseat, we really had no idea how many users we’d have on the site all at once and how much they’d tax the server. After selling the app for several months, it became apparently that Tripleseat’s growth was going to be fairly steady and predictable. No techcrunching or YouTube-esque traffic patterns. As a result, the primary reason we chose EC2–the ability for Tripleseat to scale an infinite number of servers–wasn’t justified. 37Signals basecamp app grew in a similar fashion:

“We ordered a dedicated server from our original web hosts at Tilted and turned it on. Basecamp ran on that single dedicated box for a year. One server, one year.” -Jason Fried

Hosting Your App on One EC2 Instance is Dangerous

Back in December, our Tripleseat EC2 instance disappeared from the Internet for around an hour. There was no reason for it–we just couldn’t access tripleseat.com–and neither could our customers. Our recovery strategy was to launch a new instance from a prebuilt image, deploy the code to it, and populate the new database from backups on Amazon S3. As it turns out, this strategy means you are destined to have downtime for at least a while. We lucked out, though, as our original EC2 instance magically reappeared. But it was certainly a scary situation, and our customers were less than happy.

Overall Lessons Learned

1. If you don’t know how much traffic or bandwidth your app will require, go with a more simple and secure hosting solution. You can always ramp up. (Slicehost, dreamhost, mediatemple are all good.)
2. If you want to roll on the EC2 Cloud, don’t store data on the instance or, if you do, back it up frequently (like every 5 minutes). Additionally, make an AMI of your instance so they can be easily recreated and/or cloned.
3. Unless you can dedicate quite a bit of time to configuring, running, and monitoring EC2 instances, I’d recommend a less risky hosting solution that provides immediate support and full, automated server backups.

I’ve been slowly picking up Ruby on Rails over the last few months, and having a ball. It’s been good for me to get outside of my ASP.NET/Visual Studio comfort zone and have to think a little more about what I am doing. It’s also been a great reminder of how foreign a new development environment, in this case TextMate, can feel after using the same family of tools for a long period of time. The menus are different, the look and feel is not what you are used to, and you don’t know any of the keyboard shortcuts.

For me, the longest learning curve is always the keyboard shortcuts. It takes time to figure out which ones are worth remembering, and which are not. This is where I decided to cut corners – and learn from Kevin and Dusty. I cleverly disguised my quest as “research” for a blog post. Dusty didn’t take the bait, but Kevin went for it – hook, line, and sinker. When I emailed him earlier this week about his favorites, he had a pretty good list. So good, in fact, that I feel I should share.