Third Party Code

Multivariate Testing, PHP Frameworks, Plea for help.

Vid Luther — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:35:54 +0000

I was curious if anyone has any experience with Multivariate (A/B) testing with PHP Frameworks. I found http://phpabtest.com/ yesterday, but I haven’t heard of anyone using it in production yet. Nor have I been able to gather how easily or well it integrates with Symfony, or other frameworks that introduce some level of caching.

Here’s what I’d like to measure.

How often I showed the blue sign up button on a page.
How often people clicked on that blue sign up button (currently I’m using event tracking..)

That’s basically it for now, I was thinking of firing off a custom variable into google analytics everytime I showed a specific variation, but I don’t have the backend logic to show the different variations an equal number of times. It would just a rand() call.. This smells very wrong, so I was curious what the rest of the community was using

PS: I’ve used Google Website optimizer for basic A/B tests of landing pages, but multivariate tests make the management and markup within the views unmanageable… unless someone has an interesting framework already in place..

The Best Web Design, and Copywriting Reference. EVER.

Vid Luther — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:10:33 +0000

I’ve been exchanging some emails with my good friend Bobby Freeman. We’ve been discussing some copy and design for a new project I’ve launched, and am looking to share with the rest of the world. He pointed me to the best web design guide ever. I’d like to share it with all of you, I have this printed and on my wall now. Thanks Bobby.

Being Lean by accident, in 5th grade.

Vid Luther — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:21:42 +0000

When I was growing up in India, we had to take “computer programming” courses in 5th grade. At that time they taught us a language called Logo . Making a turtle draw concentric circles was easy, so my friends and I figured out how to get out of what was then an IDE, into qbasic so we could play Gorilla.

Once we figured out how to get out of Logo, word grew throughout the school that some of us had figured out how to do it, other kids asked us how to do it. Then, one of us had the idea of making the computer beep every time the teacher said “sheet”.. (you have to be North Indian, be able to identify a south indian accent, and be a 5th grader to get the joke.. trust me).

Once the beeps got old and annoying, a girl asked if it was possible to make the computer “sing”. long story short.. we figured that part out just in time for christmas, and most of the computers were singing Jingle Bells.

So in summary, we had 5 steps.

Phase 1 – Get out of Logo (notice that you have an itch)
Phase 2 – Get out of Logo (itch scratched, tell people about it)
Phase 3 – People ask you to help them get out of Logo (lunch money)
Phase 4 – Censor the teacher (show students what else can be done)
Phase 5 – Girl (High value customer) asks for a feature (get the girl) (to my wife, I don’t even remember her name.. seriously)..

Now, I’m 31, and there’s a new girl I’m trying to get. I need to do what I did in 5th grade, to get this girl as well, I don’t know why I’ve been doing everything but that. I’d be willing to bet, I can do it in 4 steps now.

SQL Error with Symfony 1.4.4 and MySQL 5.5

Vid Luther — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:19:36 +0000

I ran into an interesting bug/fact today while messing around with MySQL 5.5. It seems that in the DDL, you can’t say “Type=InnoDB|MyISAM|Foo” anymore. You have to say “Engine=InnoDB”.

This will break your propel:build-all , or propel:build-all-load .. or if you manually try to execute the sql from data/sql/*. You’ll get the following error:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘Type=InnoDB’ at line 11

This issue is resolved in Propel 1.5.0, but I’m not sure when Symfony will include that in the Symfony 1.4 series.

To fix this issue, all you need to do is edit one file:

symfony/lib/plugins/sfPropelPlugin/lib/vendor/propel-generator/classes/propel/engine/builder/sql/mysql/MysqlDDLBuilder.php

Line 156, change it to say: $script .= “Engine=$mysqlTableType”;

Hope this helps anyone else using Propel, Symfony and MySQL 5.5

What I learnt from the “Lean Startup Smackdown” at SXSW 2010.

Vid Luther — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:16:48 +0000

I ended up at the Smackdown by accident, luck, act of God. I had no clue what was in store.

I needed to talk to the Chargify team about their new metered/usage billing , finally Cheddar Getter has a competitor. Lance Walley suggested we talk at the party, so Paul Singh and I decided to go. I didn’t know that the lean startup smackdown was the feature of the party.

The smackdown, was basically Eric Ries , and Dave McClure taking questions from the audience, and talking about what it means to be a “lean startup”

I’m very glad I went, it was almost an epiphany for me, something clicked, and I think for the better. Before I continue, I’d like to say that I think the meaning of lean startup is not cannon, it means different things to different people, at different stages of life. So, there will be a lot of people who will apply one aspect of a lean startup at the wrong time, and come away with the “it’s a passing fad” or “it’s the buzzword du jour” feeling.

What it means to be “lean” for me

This is how I have been affected, and this is how I will be working from now on.

Reduce waste Basically, I became too entrenched in “enterprise” software where everything had to be “robust” and fault tolerance, so I’d over engineer. Even though I spoke out against “micro optimizations”, I was still over engineering for every possible scenario. If someone finds an edge case, I’ll tackle the problem then, but I won’t spend time trying to think of every possible edge case.
Talk Less, Do More I will not spend more than an hour planning a feature, I will start writing code and seeing something working first, I will deploy as soon as the basic feature is ready, and see how many customers use it, how they use it, and how they think it can be improved.
Stop building features nobody asked for I’ve counseled people, and told them that sometimes the clearest feedback is no feedback. In personal matters and what I’ve now realized in corporate matters, if your users aren’t giving you feedback, then you’re ignoring their needs, and they are ignoring you. Silence means your product is not something they think about, and if they don’t think about it, you’re probably not helping them make money. If you’re not helping them make money, or reducing a pain for them, they have no reason to pay you.
Funding does not equal success Just because a VC/Angel wants to fund me, doesn’t mean I’m succeeding or have done so. When I can legitimately not consider funding, when customers are paying more than just my hosting bills, and when I get testimonals from customers saying I’ve made their life easier, is when I’ve succeeded.

There’s quite a bit more to every item above, and I’d love to discuss them with you, but doing that in this blog post alone, would be the exact oppposite of my new religion .

SxSWi 2010 as seen by an entrepreneur wanna be

Vid Luther — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:45:37 +0000

Update: March 19, 2010, the Lean Startup Blog post is up.

We just got back from SxSWi, that’s South by Southwest Interactive. A Film, Music and Interactive festival in Austin, TX. I’m not sure what they mean/meant by calling the technology part of it, “interactive”.. are the people attending the music and film festivals not interacting?

The backlash has begun about it, many people who have a lot more experience than I do, have already said how this year was different.
Rob LaGesse has some very nice insights as well.

I agree with most of them, let me start with how it was better for me this year, than last year.

The Good Things about SXSWi

We had a booth, and we had a viable product to sell, unlike last year, where we asked people to sign up to a product, that wasn’t developed (we never launched it btw).
There were more developers here than before, though they were hard to find, and virtually ignored by websites that crunch tech news
AT&T came through, they never went down, though I’m not one to normally congratulate someone for providing the level of service I am paying for, I think the biggest thing it showed was that AT&T didn’t just pay lip service, they came to play, and they played very well.
Whoever setup the network and Wifi for SXSW should be recognized as well. This was the best Wifi experience at a conference I’ve ever seen. I’ve setup mobile NOCs for conventions before, and I know how hard it is to setup a network across such a large area, congratulations.
The Lean startup smack down, this is actually personally on top of my list, I needed to to attend this event, which I attended by accident. It deserves it’s own blog post, so.. stay tuned.
Lack of open bars. Open bars don’t lead to sales, this showed people are spending money on the right things.
A better ratio of men and women. I’m really sorry about the experiences of Jolie , I apologize on behalf of my gender. I talked with a lot of business owners, and potential customers, who were women, they were genuinely interested in the product, and had excellent feedback for us. It was good to have discussions about business decisions as well as aesthetics, I know how to think like a man, but I have a lot to learn from women.
I met 3 potential candidates for growing our team, and we hired one on the spot. He’ll be moving to San Antonio next week. More on that later as well.
The #vcSecrets party, even though I’m not looking for funding, it was insightful to meet all the other entrepreneurs that need, or think they need funding (most of you don’t btw).

The Bad Things about SXSWi

The foursquare v gowalla gossip. I don’t blame either company for cashing in on it, the name of the game is increasing the number of users,
which puts them in a better position, when negotiating with vendors, but the checkins on twitter/facebook need to go. I follow a lot of people on twitter,
I don’t follow all of them on 4square, I don’t need to know where they are, I just want to read what they have to say. Again, I understand that this is a
very nascent market, and we’ll all figure out the etiquette soon enough, I’m just throwing my 2 cents in.
The social media douchebaggery. You might have a trillion followers on twitter, there are still a quadrillion people who have no clue who you are.
The lack of tech news that made it out of the convention center. Local reporters did a great job of convering the companies from Texas, my friends
Nan and Alan did an excellent job of helping companies in San Antonio get their word out, most social media douche bags just tweeted about the
other douchebags they were hanging with.
Again, social media is nascent, and I think the children will be separated from the grown ups in the next 24 months. Just because you know how to use twitter/facebook/4sq/gowalla doesn’t mean you know the industry you’re tweeting about. A social media expert is definitely not a conversion, sales, or business expert.. neither am I.

HipHop for PHP is not for you 60% of the time, everytime.

Vid Luther — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:18:11 +0000

My apologies to Ron Burgundy for the title of the post, but I’m just a fan of the wisest man to ever live.

As Marco and Illia and countless others have said, unless you don’t work with PHP or were in a coma, Facebook released

HipHop for PHP , it’s open source, it’s awesome, it makes you go fast.

It’s not for you.

You, being the average PHP developer, systems administrator, hacker. A lot is being made of how CPU load went down by 50% etc, that’s a great number and on the surface very hard to argue with, but to really understand it, you must understand the problem a lot better. Facebook didn’t decide to write HipHop and use it in production because they had all this money laying around and felt like paying 3 engineers to work on something. They looked at other existing alternatives, implemented them, and when they maxed them out, decided to switch.

HipHop Does Not:

Make your database queries faster. A slow database is slow whether accessed via PHP or C++, Java, Scala, Ruby…..
Make your images load faster
Debug faster / better, if anything you’ll be debugging HipHop and PHP , to make sure something didn’t break in the conversion.

I really want people to understand, that the decision to switch to HipHop isn’t a light decision, and it’s definitely not the silver bullet.

If anything, HipHop should be your last resort.

But, it’ll help me reduce the number of web heads!

It’ll also make you change your deployment process, you’ll have to learn how to use gdb and other tools to debug things in production.

Keep that in mind when you think about the monthly cost of a cloud server, or a slice at slicehost. The number of servers arguments comes into play when you can eliminate > 100 servers.

If you’re going from 4 servers to 2, I guarantee you that you’re doing it wrong.

I suggest you to look into your application more, and find the bottlenecks. Be absolutely certain that you can’t tweak your DB any more, or use APC, or Zend Server or something else.

Installing the PHP SSH2 extension in Snow Leopard (10.6)

Vid Luther — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:03:58 +0000

Getting PHP with SSH support is not an easy task in Snow Leopard. If you need it, here’s a hackish way to do it, until Sara or Mike get around to patching the ssh2 in PECL.

Requirements:

Xcode : You’re going to be compiling stuff, get it from the apple dev site, be sure to install the unix dev tools.
Brew: This will help you install libssh2: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

The Hack

In an ideal world, all you should’ve had to do is just run sudo pecl install ssh2-beta, if you do this, it’ll fail even after you’ve met the dependencies above.

To make your life easier, go ahead and run that command, and let it fail. Once it fails, you’ll need to patch the downloaded file.

In my case, I had to go to /private/var/tmp/apache_mod_php/apache_mod_php-53~1/Build/tmp/pear/download/ssh2-0.11.0

Go get the patch file mentioned here: http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=16727
Install the patch: patch -p0 < ssh2-php53.patch
Run make
Run make install
Add the extension in php.ini (extension=ssh2.so)

Have fun with the docs: http://php.net/manual/en/book.ssh2.php

PS: I’m running Snow Leopard 10.6.3 so my paths may be different than most people running 10.6.2. (yes 10.6.3 will have 5.3.1)

Managing WordPress and other PHP projects with Ruby

Vid Luther — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:34:14 +0000

The past month or so has given us a lot of blog posts on how, and why we should use automated build and deploy systems.
One of the best deployment systems out there (imho), is by the Ruby community, and it’s called Capistrano. We’ve been using it internally since this summer to manage and deploy our Symfony application with great success. I’ll be sharing the methodology to “Capify” a Symfony project soon, but first I wanted to share the WordPress-Capistrano project.

The goals of the project are:

Make deployment and upgrades of WordPress easier for multiple installs of wordpress on multiple hosts
Secure WordPress in production by setting stricter permissions, to prevent SQL/XSS attacks that modify PHP files.
Allow one to easily manage the 3 tiered development cycle, but with WordPress
Make deployment of WordPress simpler on the Rackspace Cloud
Synchronization of WordPress stages (move db from production to stage, push configuration settings to production)

Currently, you can clone the repository, configure wordpress locally, setup your Capistrano recipe and start deploying.

I’ve tried to comment out the recipes, but I’m sure I need to do a better job. Feel free to ask me any questions, post issues and patches.

I’m also looking into the Moonshine project, and perhaps forking it to be independent of Rails, I’m really digging it’s ease of use and depth of features.

You have no clue. Or, “Release Early, Release Often” in laymen’s terms.

Vid Luther — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:15:33 +0000

I don’t have much to add to this, this just a great post. It explains the ‘release early, release often’ mantra very well. As an entrepreneur who’s busy building/fine tuning and releasing his own application to the world, this is a great refresher. I don’t know what I’m doing, the past 4 months lay out the case for that very well. And this post reminds me, that it’s ok, as long as I’m willing to learn from it. I would add that usertesting.com is a great site, service and definitely needs to be very high on your priority list. Especially if you don’t have hundreds of users going to your product.