Rapid prototyping w/ front-end JS & Mongo

My stealth-ish startup, Boundless Learning, is building some very cool products, on top of some very cool technologies, and while the majority of our value will be user-facing, there is a fair chunk of interesting back-office systems that we’ve developed to support our bigger mission. 

It’s important that we are able to rapidly produce & adjust those back-office systems, so that we can direct focus on making high-quality experiences for our users. One ‘trick’ we’ve developed, is to allow the browser-client layer to control the schema/data that is stored by a MongoDB back-end. The JS code sends JSON to the server-code, which (very nearly) blindly thunks it through straight to Mongo.

This allows us to eliminate an entire layer’s complexity/code, and gives us *huge* flexibility to rapidly iterate our models (Mongo is schema-less and requires no migration scripts for a vast majority of modeling changes). By keeping a hyper-thin server layer, you eliminate 1/2 of code you’d otherwise author. This is a big-win for “building the plane as it is being flown”.

If technical detail around this would be interesting to folks, I’d look forward to the chance to whip up some slides & tutorial around the nitty gritty of this particular rapid-prototyping approach.

Proxlet, Twitter’s barometer

Proxlet has been one of my more interesting projects. (It solves an acute Twitter pain, it allows you to mute noisy users/apps)

One thing I’ve learned is that on any given day, the usage/user-ratings for Proxlet very directly reflect the at-the-time quality of the Twitter API service. Twitter chokes up, folks perceive the middle-man-Proxlet as the issue, numbers go down. Twitter operates smoothly, Proxlet’s adoption continues to grow. (Not much we can do about that! Our quality of service is tied to Twitter’s! Unfortunately, that’s been fairly low as of late)

The second thing I’ve learned is that folks can be very demanding & critical of a free-service. It takes thick-skin to support those who assume your product wasn’t a labor of love, but rather the sole output of some full-time enterprise, and who criticize your execution accordingly. It’s worth reminding other developers out there: the noisy few don’t represent the thousands of silent, active, & satisfied users!

Boundless Learning, Hiring Revolutionaries

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results”

-Albert Einstein

You: “Einstein?  I thought this was a job posting.”

Indeed it is, but Einstein sums up why Boundless Learning exists:  we are building a different type of company to take on a insane, and massive, incumbent industry in a way that has never been done before. If you want to be part of the early team embarking on a challenging, exciting, and impactful then keep reading….

The Team

For us, it is about enjoying the journey, not just the destination. And the most important part of enjoying the journey is of course the team.  So before we tell you about the job and what we do, let us tell you about ourselves. 

A quick Google and LinkedIn search will show you the background of  the great team of founders (Ariel Diaz, Aaron White, and Brian Balfour) and investors (Founder Collective, SV Angel, Nextview Ventures, and Kepha Ventures) that we have assembled.  But here are some things that you won’t find in any of our blogs or profiles:  We are insanely competitive, have a strange obsession for the color orange, run marathons, occasionally LARP*, go on man-cations, think we were a Civil War general in a former lifetime, and aspire to own a pet sloth.  

In all seriousness, combined we have started 6 companies, raised $15M+ in funding from tier-one investors, built products that have reached over 110 million consumers, and are ready to take on our biggest idea yet.  

Why join us?

You: “Ok Ok.  That sounds sweet because I LARP too!  So what is this massive industry you speak of?”   

Us: “Great question.  Here it comes…Education!“

You: “Education?  Seriously? “

Damn right, education.  Education is a $650+ Billion dollar industry, ripe for disruption. We are building a company that aligns ourselves with the actual customer, the students.  We aren’t optimizing prep-tests, renting textbooks, or selling t-shirts. We are approaching this from the ground up, with a nothing-to-lose attitude. When we succeed, education will look very different.   

Want more details? Then come talk to us.  We’ll buy you a beer (or fancy martini if that’s what you prefer).

Join Us

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to be part of the foundation of the team. Someone who is:

• Happily employed & a top performer, but wants something more.
• Passionate about startups and big challenges.
• Ready/Eager to wield Scala, NoSQL & ingenuity to tackle hard problems
• a “jack of all trades” - comfortable from /command-line to $(“.wherever”)
• wants to be part of, and build, a great company & culture

If these qualities describe you, and you want to drop some knowledge on the education industry with us, then email me: aaron@boundlesslearning.com

*BTW….we were joking about the LARPing…..maybe.

MongoDB + Node talk: NYC, late March

For those of you that interested in MongoDB & Node, I’ll be presenting at the PostgreSQL Conference this March. Details for the talk here: http://bit.ly/gvgT4a

My Node.js Talk on Proxlet

Proxlet has been all over the news today: Gizmodo / Lifehacker, BusinessInsider, Swiss-miss… and even 100shiki have covered it.

Throughout all this massive press, our $10/month server hasn’t skipped a single beat. How? Node.js.

If you’re interested in learning how Node.js lets Proxlet handle millions upon millions of queries on the cheapest of cloud servers, please join me the Boston Javascript Feb 3rd meetup, for my presentation ‘Node.js FTW.’

WebM: Google’s weapon against iPhone battery life

A conspiracy theory for you to mull over:

Apple takes great care to ensure a long battery life for their iOS devices, by carefully controlling the hardware & software metaphors that impact it. The result is that iOS devices vastly outlast Android comparables.

By pushing the web towards the WebM codec, Google can very quickly knock a key benefit of the iPhone, namely H.264 hardware decoding, out of the equation. It seems very unlikely Apple will quickly pivot to add hardware WebM support, both because they are likely stubborn, and because of device constraints & their need to continue to support H.264. 

Thanks Google! I look forward to hating mobile video on my iPhone as much as folks on Android hate it.

Competition & Class

Having competition is great, personally, I get fired up and motivated into new levels of energy. Friends have seen me “on the warpath”. My productivity & focus seem to double instantaneously. (If I only I could bottle this, and sell it to you, friends)

I recently discovered Proxlet has a new competitor. The value Proxlet provides (muting annoying tweets) is a problem many people have thought about, and have tried to solve in various ways, so I was by no means surprised to find another competitor.

I was however shocked to learn the following:

• The product was eerily similar
• The developer had been using Proxlet for months
• Proxlet users were actively being poached on Twitter
• AdWords had been taken out against Proxlet
• Coordinated down-vote activity against Proxlet on Quora

This is classless, childish, and ultimately in-effective.

Competition with class can be confrontational, there is nothing wrong with that. If your product is better than mine, by all means, trumpet the horn & tout your merits. If you’re looking to dethrone a giant, call him out by name! (Witness RunKeeper vs Nike for an example of competition done right)

But in the world of small startups, attempting to directly compete with one another is a waste resources & time, when the real battle is for awareness.

Compete on your merits and stand tall, or shut up and go home.