One of the key strategies to deliver project on time is to make sure your client understands what’s going on. The best way to accomplish this is to establish a simple process that you can explain in a few minutes and then follow it throughout the whole project.

In my freelance experience I developed a very simple strategy that has helped me be more efficient and look professional when meeting with clients.

Processes and rules are boring but they produce happy clients

Este próximo martes, 9 de Abril de 2013 a las 6:30 pm será la cuarta reunión de prPIG (Puerto Rico Python Interest Group) y la primera con el “nuevo formato”. De ahora en adelante en cada reunión tendremos a alguien del grupo o algún invitado especial haciendo una presentación al principio de la reunión.

Para estrenar este formato el martes José Padilla y yo presentaremos sobre Blimp, que como muchos saben está escrito principalmente en Python. Creemos que va a estar bueno y que será útil para todos los interesados en web development no importa el lenguaje que usen, ni el nivel de experiencia programando. Los problemas que tenemos que resolver en Blimp son los mismos que tienen que resolver todos los web developers, no importa si programas en Ruby, JavaScript, Java, C# o PHP.

Así que toda la comunidad de developers de Puerto Rico queda invitada para esta reunión, incluso los no Pythonistas. La misión principal del grupo es crear una comunidad de developers local sin importar los lenguajes. Se escogió Python porque pareció ser bastante popular y la fundación de Python está ayudando al grupo a organizarse.

Hay muchas iniciativas que queremos hacer y estamos sólo empezando. Este es el mejor momento para unirse y aportar a la comunidad.

La reunión se celebra en la oficina de AsoPYMES en la Avenida Ponce de León 452, Suite 403. Esto es en el edificio de la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico en Hato Rey, cerca del Departamento del Trabajo. Hay un estacionamiento amplio y seguro.

Aquí hay un mapa que marca el edificio donde se celebran las reuniones y el estacionamiento.

El grupo está en todas partes así que no hay excusa para no hacer “follow”.

• prpig.org
• Google Groups
• Google Plus Communities
• Facebook Pages
• Twitter

Los esperamos el martes.

En estos últimos años he estado trabajando en la creación de productos. El proceso es bastante simple. Hay una idea, se trata de identificar las personas que le puede interesar comprar el producto, se le muestra un prototipo, se recogen sus impresiones, modificamos el prototipo y repetimos.

Aunque este proceso puede parecer obvio para algunos, puedo asegurar que no lo es. Desde que estoy metido en todo esto de Startups of Puerto Rico, cada semana hablo con alguien que tiene una idea o quiere dedicarle tiempo a crear una compañía y lanzar algún producto. El problema es que la gran mayoría están enfocados en crear una compañía para luego empezar a trabajar en crear un producto, como si lo primero fuera necesario.

Mi punto es que si no tienes un producto o servicio que esté generando dinero, no tienes un negocio por lo tanto no tienes que formalizar nada.

De mis experiencias pasadas y de todas las anécdotas que he leído o escuchado sobre emprendedores, artistas y políticos exitosos hay algo que es unánime. Lo más difícil que se puede lograr es crear algo que la gente quiera.

Por lo tanto todas las energías y todo el tiempo debe ser invertido en crear algo que la gente quiera. Las compañías y personas mas exitosas logran crear algo que la gente quiere y luego se ven obligados a crear una compañía para poder satisfacer la demanda y mantener todo organizado.

La compañía no es la meta, es un mecanismo para facilitar el acceso a ese producto o servicio que la gente quiere.

Esto también significa que en los primeros años de la vida de una compañía todos los integrantes del equipo deben ser personas que tengan que ver directamente con el producto. En otras palabras no necesitas un socio contable o abogado, si tu idea no tiene nada que ver con leyes o finanzas.

El equipo debe estar compuesto por personas que aportan de forma directa al producto y que si solo un miembro del equipo falta es imposible crear el producto. Necesitas “doers” no “managers”. Es súper fácil aprender las destrezas de gerencia necesarias para un pequeño negocio y todos los startups son pequeños negocios. En cambio es el trabajo de toda una vida aprender las destrezas necesarias para crear productos que la gente quiera.

Hazte esta pregunta antes de invitar a alguien a tu equipo:

¿Si “Fulano” no está en el equipo es imposible crear un prototipo?

Si la repuesta es que, sin “Fulano” no puedes llegar a un prototipo, necesitas a “Fulano”.

Si la respuesta es que sin “Fulano” puedes llegar a un prototipo pero tal vez con mucha dificultad y quizás el prototipo no sea tan bueno, no necesitas a “Fulano”.

Si llegas a tener un prototipo, cosa que no muchos logran (no porque sea difícil sino por muchos otros factores) entonces miras a ver que te hace falta para validar ese prototipo y comenzar el proceso de iteración hasta llegar a un producto que la gente quiera comprar o hasta engavetar la idea para luego.

Hasta que no descubras que es lo que la gente quiere no tienes nada y no hay que complicarse la vida con asuntos que no añaden valor al producto.

Como siempre me gustaría saber que piensan sobre esto. Seguramente estoy obviando muchas cosas pero esto es lo que tengo en mente cuando estoy empezando un proyecto.

I’ve been blogging for 5 years now. This site is something like my 3rd or 4th attempt at having a blog that actually was maintained and did not die in a few months. It’s been hard work. The whole first year I wrote every day, just to get into the habit and it payed off. I often get job offers and meet interesting people through my writings.

When I first started my choice was to use Tumblr, because at the moment it seemed like if I used something very simple it would be easier to maintain and it would help me keep my interest. For the most part it worked. The first years I did a lot of posts and kept the momentum going. Tumblr allowed me to publish little pieces of content that kept the blog active and in the top of my mind.

After a few incidents with the Tumblr service (they where down for a few days) I decided that elweb was mature enough to get a makeover and also it’s own hosting. I was already paying for a VPS that wasn’t getting a lot of use so it was perfect. This blog became a WordPress site and it got a new look courtesy of the iA Template for WordPress. I really love that template. The only bad thing about it was that every few days someone accused me of stealing their design. That’s not a good thing if you earn a living designing websites.

After a while on WordPress, the site started feeling a little slow and Jekyll and Octopress where the cool kids on the block. The idea of having my site hosted as static files seemed great so I gave Jekyll a try. After a few hours of playing, it seemed that the transition would be very complicated. I had hundreds of blog posts that needed to be converted to markdown and also I had to figure out how to do forwards for all the old urls. I gave up.

Then I tried Octopress just to confirm that I was not giving up too easy and I have to say that it looks a lot better out of the box and it has everything I want except a custom template. So the idea was to hack a very simple template, just like the one this site uses now and maybe take advantage of some of the cool plugins Octopress has. Turns out it’s a lot harder that I thought. After spending a whole day trying to get to a point where I could actually understand how to implement a custom theme I was really frustrated and decided that maybe I was not beign successful because I was using a Ruby tool and I’m not a Ruby expert. So the next idea was to try something made in Python.

I found Pelican, a static site generator written in Python and using a lot of the ideas I’m used to. Again after a few hours I was frustrated and tired, so I gave up.

This “cool idea” was taking me too much time. This is just a blog not my job.

Frustrated with my failed attempts I decided just to try to optimize my WordPress site. I did a lot of research and learned a lot about WordPress optimization but the one thing that changed everything was a very cool plugin called WP Super Cache. I also tried W3 Total Cache which seems to be a lot more popular and polished but it’s just not as good. WP Super Cache FTW!

This plugin is great. Basically it generates static versions of all your pages on demand and from that point on it serves the static version instead of hitting the database or even the PHP scripts. You can even integrate with Amazon S3 and Cloud Front so you get CDN distribution of your site with just a few clicks.

My site has been featured on reddit and on Hacker News a few times and it has received tens of thousands of visits in a few minutes without failing or even slowing down.

This setup made me so confident that I moved my site from the VPS to the cheapest plan that Dreamhost offers and with this plugin installed the site is just as fast. The only down side is that the admin part of WordPress is super slow because I’m hosting on a shared server. My solution for this is that I do all of my writing on Evernote and just copy paste when I’m done.

The only thing that I have to do differently is that when a post is published I just click on the Delete cache button that appears on my toolbar and that’s it. The site re-generates all pages and the site becomes super fast again.

The plugin has many options you can tweak if you are into that. But for me I just delete the cache every time I publish a new post and that’s it, no preloading or garbage collection.

So there you have it. Just install the WP Super Cache plugin and you can make your WordPress site behave like a static site from one of the popular generators out there.

The difference is that you also get to use any of thousands of WordPress plugins and themes available, an easy to understand interface that works great with non-technical collaborators and best of all, making custom themes for WordPress is super easy. Who knows, you might event get inspired and make a theme that you can sell for beer money.

As always, I want to know what you think. Do you know of better ways of doing this?

As president of a student organization (ACM-ECE) in charge of promoting student development, part of my job is finding ways to get people pumped up about pursuing CS related fields of work. This past november a good friend of mine, Yamil, started talking about a Hackathon he was organizing with the help of Startups of Puerto Rico and how any serious programmer must attend. A Hackathon presents a unique venue for programmers, an opportunity to meet other “hackers” and tech industry representatives in a friendly environment. During the event I had the opportunity to meet a community that I had thought to be absent in Puerto Rico (the Startup Community).

The twelve hour hackathon was an intense experience, one of the best experiences a hacker could ever have. You bring your ideas and spend an entire day coding alongside people who share a same interest as you. As an incentive, there was food, beverages and SWAG, but the part that interested me the most was the resources available. If you had any questions, there were people willing to answer questions, or at least point you in the right direction in a friendly environment.

After the event, I contacted Yamil, and told him of my interest to bring that activity over to the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, thus the 2nd Hackathon by HackPR was born.

The info
The 2nd HackPR Hackathon will commence at 8:00am on March 2, 2013 in the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. Registration is now open for both students and startups. You may find news and information on our Facebook event and on @HackPuertoRico.

Sign up today

This holiday season had it’s fair share of uncertainty, fear and even sadness. My dad has been in and out of the hospital since the beginning of December. He has always had high blood pressure and almost every year he has to go to the hospital to get his pressure under control.

This time was different, for the past few months he has been getting tired easily and began having a really nasty cough. As usual he ended up at the hospital. His doctors where not making him better and the hospital he was in was not helping either. After changing his whole medical team and hospital and  after a few days of tests, the new doctors concluded that heart valve replacement surgery was required. The news where very hard on him and on all of us, but it had to be done.

I wrote this post while waiting to hear news after the surgery. Now (while editing the post) I know that everything went according to plan and my dad is getting better rapidly. A huge relief for me, my family and all our friends.

As a startup founder I’m starting to get used to a roller coaster of emotions, some days you feel great, others you feel you can’t continue but keep doing it anyway. Yesterday while working next to my dad’s hospital bed he told me to keep pushing forward and making things happen. That felt great, I was starting to feel guilty for working while staying with him at the hospital.

Even though I have been doing some work while my dad has been in the hospital, my two co-founders have taken over most tasks. They are doing their jobs and mine, when we talk they first ask about my dad, listen to what I have to say and then give me words of support. They have never complained about doing all of the extra work this situation has thrown over them.

When I heard that choosing your co-founders is one of the most important decisions you can make in a startup I didn’t really get it. But now I do. José and Elving heard what was going on with my dad and automatically took over Blimp without me even asking. They are doing everything while being extremely supportive. Even if Blimp never becomes what we know it’s going to become, working with these two it’s a true honor.

Thank you guys, you are the best, with a team like the one we have there are no other posible outcomes, in a way or another we will succeed.

So, to summarize: in order to run a startup from a hospital you need really smart and awesome co-founders like the ones I have, @jpadilla_ and @elving.

Now, let’s get back to work.

Listen to the episode

Just a quick note to let everyone know that today we are launching a brand new blog just for Blimp. If the design looks similar to this one is because the theme is based on elweb’s theme.

Also, we are announcing an extension on Blimp’s beta tester plan offer for 7 more days (until January 9, 2013). The details are on the new blog.

Let us know what you think about the new blog.

Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite film directors of all time. I admire his work and his passion for making people “feel something”. A true master of his craft.

A lot of my admiration for Hitchcock comes from reading a wonderful book by the french director François Truffaut. The book is a collection of interviews and letters between the two.

What I really wanted to share is a very clever note that Hitchcock wrote to Truffaut on one of his visits. It’s a very short christmas card, but very Hitchcock.

Just a few days ago we told you about our Dropbox integration. Today we are happy to announce that Blimp now plays nicely with Google Drive.

Now on the files page you can upload files from your computer, attach files from Dropbox or Google Drive. So, if you have your files on Google Drive is pretty simple to attach them to tasks or just share them with your team within a project.

Files attached from Google Drive won’t count agains your plan storage limits. If you want to start using Google Drive today, just upgrade to the beta tester plan.