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Buck Two Eighty

April 2, 2012 Business
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I used to be part owner of a company called “Buck Two Eighty, LLC.” I renamed the first instantiation of EK Mitchell, LLC and split ownership with my friend. We bought and sold stocks together. It wasn’t much of a business, but it kept us in touch, and that was good.

The name came from something in his family. I think his grandfather, but I’m not sure. If asked how much money he made, he’d answer “buck two-eighty.” If asked again, he’d answer “thirty-seven fifty.”

I’ve turned that over in my head over and over, and it’s made income into an abstract concept for me. I guess I should be more specific, it’s made revenue an abstract concept. Revenue means nothing, except in contrast to expenses.

My goal is to reduce expenses. You become so much more competitive in the marketplace if you can enter with low expenses. You can call the shots on so many things. It makes life so much better.

A year from now, I expect to have expenses down 25%. That will be huge. I’ll be able to write my ticket.

Update after a busy year

December 5, 2011 Business
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2011 is coming to a close, and I’m beginning to start end of year activities for EK Mitchell, LLC.

The year began with an exciting new contract position at Best Buy, and things were looking up. I was busy through the spring and took on additional clients, working in the evenings and weekends. My job at Best Buy continued to go well, and in July they offered me a permanent position as a Senior Lead Developer. After careful consideration, I accepted the offer, and began the process of winding down my fledgling consulting business.

This fall I wrapped up my final work as an independent contractor and I am now putting 100% of my efforts toward my job at Best Buy, which has changed from Senior Lead Developer to Web Development Manager. I’m excited about the work that needs to be done in the year ahead.

When I’m not spending time with my wonderful wife and son I’m working on preparing my old house to become a rental property in South Minneapolis. My goal is to have that rented out in April or May.

Beyond that, I’m always coming up with ideas, as usual. I’ll take one thing at a time, and I have no plans to quit my day job, but who knows what the future holds.

Dark as a Dungeon

April 4, 2011 Business
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There’s a song on the first Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album called Dark as a Dungeon, originally written by Merle Travis, and it’s served as a parable for me on my philosophy of work. The song encourages young men to avoid seeking fortune in the mines, because the work is miserable. There might be quick gains, but the risks are high, and too often, you come away with nothing.

I always hear a message in between the lines of that song, that life is better as a farmer. The work is just as hard, but you have the sun on your shoulders, and the fields yield back year after year. The gains come slowly, but after years of work, you have fertile fields to pass down to another generation, which will continue to yield for years to come.

I found the same analogy the other day in this article on creating a software company. It seems the author shares the same philosophy that I do.

Tech startups have become a fetish. It could be seen at this year’s South by Southwest Festival. They had a bus that went from California to Austin, and it was filled with young techies challenged to create the next startup in the course of the trip.

There’s less emphasis paid these days on building a business that will last. In my opinion, that’s the measure of the quality of anything — how long will it last? Whether it’s a building, a bridge, software, or a business, the test of time reveals the measure of its value.

That’s the vision for EK Mitchell, LLC. To go to work each day, and do the little things right. To always leave a fertile field after every harvest. With hard work, I’ll add to my acreage, and increase my yield modestly year after year. A services business is no get rich quick scheme.

No, the reward is in the work. If you enjoy what you do, you never have to retire. And the fields will give back to you year after year.

Newsletter Number One

April 2, 2011 Business / Mobile / Wordpress
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Taking a cue from this article, I’ve decided to start telling the story of my fledgling business by sending out a monthly email. (Editor’s note: I’m not trying to raise $635K anytime soon)

If you want to get these emails as they come out, please email me at erik -at- ekmitchell.com and I’ll add you to the list.

Here’s the text of yesterday’s email:

Hello Friends and Family!
Welcome to my first newsletter! I’m going to be sending an email out
about once a month. You’re on this list because I thought you might
want to be.

If you’d rather not get these emails, just hit reply and tell me to
take you off the list, and I’ll take care of it right away!

Ok, are you still with me? Great!

In this issue, I’ll tell you about my company, I’ll give you an update
on what I’m doing at Best Buy, I’ll tell you about the mobile
development I’m working on, and finally about a great community event
that I was able to be a part of.

So, about my company: EK Mitchell, LLC is a web and mobile software
development company, which I founded in 2002. In the early days, I
worked as a freelance web developer. At the end of 2003, I got a great
job and put the company on the back burner, doing a little freelance
work here and there in the years that followed.

But I always wanted to give it another go, and in 2010, I made the
leap to become an independent contractor, signing up to work full time
for Best Buy Co. Inc. (more about that later). This time around I’m
laying the groundwork for a web and mobile software company that
leverages my experience, my technical ability, and my commitment to
customer service.

In the next year I hope to build EK Mitchell, LLC into a seaworthy
vessel, and set forth on the adventure of entrepreneurship. I hope to
bring other talented people in to join me, and I hope you’ll follow
along as I tell the story.

- What’s going on at Best Buy?
I was brought into Best Buy to work on its “Local Store Pages” site,
which you can visit at http://stores.bestbuy.com/5/ (that’s the Edina
store, where I got my 3rd computer!). In cooperation with the Local
Store Page business team, I helped resolve technical issues and add
important features through the end of FY11, which ended February.

This site runs on WordPress, which is a great piece of software for
powering all kinds of websites. WordPress powers millions of websites
on the Internet. Best Buy’s implementation of WordPress is such a big
deal that it’s featured on WordPress.org:
http://wordpress.org/showcase/best-buy/.

Since March 1 I’ve been working on a new project at Best Buy, which
I’ll tell you more about in the months ahead!

- And the Mobile Development thing I mentioned?
In March I was able to take a 2 day course in iPhone application
development, taught by Dan Grigsby of Drivetrain
(http://drivetrainagency.com/). It was a great intro into the world of
mobile development and I’m excited to be entering this new space as a
developer.

And I already have a project to work on! In collaboration with Nate
Mueller (http://www.nate-mueller.com/), I’m developing an iPhone app!
Look for more on that in future newsletters.

- How about Community Involvement?
Last weekend I participated in the Nerdery Overnight Web Challenge
(http://tc2011.overnightwebsitechallenge.com/), where 18 teams of web
pros came together to crank out 18 websites for 18 deserving
non-profits in 24 hours. My team built a brand new website for
Someplace Safe, a women’s crisis center in western Minnesota. The site
looks awesome, and I’ll have a link in next month’s newsletter for
everyone to see.

- In Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Next month I’ll have more to
talk about with Best Buy, including a project I did that solved a
nasty problem and brought a huge return on investment. I’ll update you
on mobile development, and also point you to the new website from the
Overnight Web Challenge.

Until then, have a great April!

These are planned for the first Friday of every month. If you want to follow along, let me know!

Used car shopping could be better

November 21, 2010 Business / Semantic Web / SEO
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People who know me know I have a love/hate relationship with cars. There have been a couple of times in my life that I’ve not had a car, but since I was 16 I think I’ve owned at least 14:

(in no particular order)

  • Isuzu Pickup (I wish I still had it)
  • Mazda 626
  • Plymouth Voyager
  • Ford F-150 (2)
  • Chevy S-10
  • Volvo 940 (2)
  • Volvo 240
  • Volkswagen Golf TDI (I wish I still had it)
  • Volkswagen Passat
  • Volkswagen Fox
  • Jeep Cherokee
  • Honda Element

My current car, a 1992 Volvo 240, is running like a champ, but in the next 12 months I’ll probably switch up to something with fewer miles. That has me hitting the used car sites pretty heavy these days.

I’m feeling the emptiness that comes from not owning a truck. I donated my red Ford F-150 this fall to the Bay Lake Area Lions Club, to be sold in their annual auction. It was time for me to move on. This truck had some sentimental value — I gave Jenny a ride home in it on our first date. The two of us combined probably weighed 230 lbs at the time — that’s a lot of truck for two small people. It was a cute scene. Especially the passenger side.

My four trucks have been: a black 1995 Isuzu Pickup, 2WD, manual, a red 1988 Chevy S-10, 4WD, manual (previously my brother’s), a green 1993 Ford F-150 4WD auto, and a red 1992 Ford F-150 2WD manual (the date truck).

This is what I’d like: a red or black 2006 or newer Chevy Colorado or GMC Canyon, 4WD, regular cab, 4WD, automatic transmission, with less than 50,000 miles.

Now, do you know how hard it is to find *the right vehicle*? You have to search multiple sites. This vehicle could be listed as a 4×4 or a 4WD. It’s hard to search for a mileage range. Car Soup only recently made it possible to search for a particular transmission type. Searching for the Colorado and the Canyon at the same time? Forget about it.

This lead me to thinking… why can’t we use Google to search for used cars? Why can’t I just go to Google and type ‘chevy colorado <50000 4wd auto' and get actual used car listings? Google has got to be crawling used car listings. It's an entity that's smart enough to show me GMC Canyons when I searched for Chevy Colorados. It's also smart enough to turn Chevy into Chevrolet when necessary, and change 4WD to 4x4.

It would depend on having pages that are designed to be indexed. Just like any product page in e-commerce, a used car page should have data optimized for search engines, to enable indexing by any crawler. This would open up the opportunity for companies to create better search tools, and ultimately serve consumers better.

There's a lot of work to be done here. A cursory search for a Cars.com API shows nothing. Dealer websites are a mishmash of .html pages, and I even saw something with a .pl extension (Perl FTW). These places aren't using a CMS. They've got a web shop on retainer keeping their sites up to date for them. Chances are they're doing double entry between their inventory system and their website. SEO is a long way off. There could be a bunch of cars on the lot that aren't on the website.

Wouldn't it be cool if they had web software that could talk to their inventory system, that also talked to important used car sites, like cars.com and Craigslist? They'd need to enter the vehicle into their system, upload some pictures, and then listings would be created automatically. Most importantly, though, their website would have a quality page for each vehicle, listing important data such as mileage, drivetrain, how many owners, etc... Customers would be all over this if it were available.

I wonder whether it's possible. Car dealerships aren't always the most progressive. It's an idea to kick around, anyway. I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts.

As for the side of me that hates cars... well, Google’s already got the transit thing working.

The Semantic Web and Other Endeavors

November 17, 2010 Business / Creativity / Linux / Semantic Web
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It suddenly got more interesting for me… more about that later. I remember hearing some talks about this at some point down the line. I can’t remember where it was though.

I’m currently reading everything I can find about RDF, OWL, Microformats, and the like on Wikipedia and elsewhere. It’s like the world is a gigantic warehouse, and the web is the inventory system.

Stay tuned on this site. I’m going to be rolling out some plugins that I learned about at the MSP Wordcamp this past weekend. One that I’m excited about is the Yet Another Related Posts plugin. I’ll be displaying related posts for each new post I create, and my hope is that visitors will find additional content on my site that is interesting to them, and that my metrics improve.

Also, I’m writing a WordPress plugin that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time… I’ll probably be doing an initial release of that in a week or so. Keep an eye out for that, especially if you’re a Linux command line type person.

Don’t code what you don’t have to

October 4, 2010 Business / Software
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So today I proudly announced on Twitter that I was implementing an insertion sort. I had reviewed sorting algorithms on Wikipedia, picked one that suited my situation well, and I was off to the races, happily coding away.

Then the project manager IM’d me. He seemed restless.

Here was the situation: we’re working on a WordPress plugin that has a form where we can add and remove field options. These are options to populate a “select” dropdown field, for example. The form takes advantage of Javascript in the sense that you can add and remove fields, and also re-order items, before hitting “save,” at which time the contents of the form is sent to the server, and the items are saved in the DB in the order they appeared on the page. The DB has a “sort” column so that items can be sorted arbitrarily.

We realized fairly recently that one of our customers using this plugin wanted the fields to be sorted alphabetically, and an other customer did not. The first customer had so many items on this form, that expecting them to sort them by hand was unreasonable. It made sense to add an “alphabetize” feature.

So I dug right in, looking forward to the challenge of creating a Javascript function that would sort these items alphabetically. Keep in mind these were not just input elements, but li elements which contained input elements. I needed to traverse the DOM somewhat to compare values and change positions according to alphabetical order.

About halfway through the day the PM pings me. I decided to sort the unsorted data for him in the database so that the client could be reassured that we had things under control. It didn’t take me long to write a simple SQL command (two actually) to reorder all of the elements in a particular field in the database itself.

Then I realized something. I shouldn’t re-implement a sort algorithm, I should use the implementation that’s made available to me by MySQL.

So in about 20 minutes I deleted the work I had done, placed a checkbox at the bottom of the form in question saying “Alphabetize?”, and added the query to the “save” function on the server side.

With the checkbox checked, a final UPDATE would be run, reordering the items according to their value, rather than the order they appeared on the form.

Not as much fun, but it worked, and it took much less time to implement. Simple solutions are often the best.

Basic Supplies

September 28, 2010 Business
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Needed to find a basic steno pad this morning, and Downtown Minneapolis shut me down.

Office Depot only had a 12 pack for $15.99 (no thanks). Target had nothing. I didn’t check Walgreens. That might have been a good idea.

I know for a fact that the Ben Franklin in Grand Marias, Minnesota has these. Big isn’t always better.