One of client's at Hashrocket, Spot Us, has posted a video on his blog that he recorded this morning during our demo, showcasing the work that was completed in 3 days of development!

Don't get me wrong, the great work by the designers was key to getting this done, and there is a week of face to face time where the client (in this case David Cohn) and the lead developer(s) lock themselves in a room for 5 days, and make the tough decisions of what can really be done in 3 days. Please take the time to watch this 15+ minute video if you want an inside view of some of the work that I am a part of.

Great work Lark, Desi, Carm, Tammer, and Joe!

So for those of you that have not heard, I am working at a great new company called Hashrocket, based out at the beach. More on that later, but I wanted to also fill you in that my old company has been purchased by Black Duck as of last week.

I keep tabs on the news reports that are coming out about it, and this is the closest thing I have to a mention in them:

But Levin says Koders’ three employees, including Rush, will be retained on a consulting basis, and will continue to work from their current location in Santa Monica.

Check out the full article at Xconomy.

The move actually makes a lot of sense, as Black Duck offers larger companies insight into their open source usage, and Koders obviously knows a thing or two about that industry.

Check me out at work:

BEHOLD the power of rails, and how a trained artisan can wield it's power. A pretty useful web application in 7 hours! No kidding! Check it out and then go get your education on.

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I was reading QuadsZilla's post about the week he is having on the SEO Black Hat, and have to admit that it sounds like I am going about this whole software development thing the wrong way.

  We were even hanging with Wiesn Playmate Anna Scharl (Miss October for German Playboy) and her sister most of the time we were out; they’re both sweethearts.

  Tonight I’m going to the Opera and tomorrow I’m doing some 3-hour caving expedition. Ahh, the life of a spammer. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

I have been working in this industry for 8 years, working on web sites for reputable companies, making decent money.  I would say that I would be the kind of person that any organization would want to have, but I find that I enjoy working at smaller start-ups, due to lack of waste more then anything, and I need a little more stress then your average person to get things done.

But if I can use my talents to startup some stupid website and just milk money away from Google and the unknown people out there, is there really a downside?  Is it illegal?  I can provide better for my family and not do something illegal.   Why would I not? 

My instinctual answer is that I wouldn't want to do it for the sake of not helping to proliferate crap on the Internet.  But (not that I would really want to) if spending 1 month a quarter coming up with some stupid website and then go spend time with my family and just watch the money come in... why is that not a good option?

I would love to hear from others that have had this same thought, and where they are on why the continue to work at a "real" company versus going out on their own taking advantage of the framework that Ad revenue has presented to us. 

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If you would like to find out more about Quadzilla, and a little insight into what makes him tick, listen to this interview that he did on Shoemoney's Net Income Show.

(Note: that this is a picture of the Shoemoney guy not Quadzilla)

As customer demands narrow-down, and the value you get from each engagement goes up, smaller, specialized vendors can gain a big advantage.

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It is a nice feeling to have your company show confidence in you by unleashing you to be quoted in a press release. From the eMediaWire:

"Code search is a missing capability in TFS and SharePoint," said Ben McDonald, product manager for the Koders Enterprise Edition. "Koders fills the gap and can help facilitate the transition to TFS from CVS, Visual SourceSafe or other legacy version control systems."

This is actually pretty cool, and Microsoft showed some interest in using our product as a stop gap to their search solution for Team Foundation Server until they get one ready enough for prime time.

Koders.com now offers over 700 million lines of open source code aggregated from public repositories, corporate developer networks, and projects contributed by individual programmers. New additions to Koders.com include code hosted by Apple Computer, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. These corporate hosts join Apache, BerliOS, Debian, Novell Forge, OpenBSD, RubyForge, SourceForge.net, Tigris and other public code repositories indexed by Koders.com.

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As my wife can attest to, I have been very busy at work lately.  Doing what, you ask?  Creating a new product and a new revenue stream.  We have developed a desktop source code search application that any developer can download, install, configure, and use to search their local source code, faster then any IDE offers and more completely then any other product that exists today.

I recently posted a more detailed explanation of the work I have been doing on the Koders blog, explaining how we taught an Teaching an old dog new tricks.

This news is actually two weeks old, but I have moved into the new office. The complete project took a lot longer then expected, but that is mainly due to the fact that I hated sanding.

Doing the demo, insulation, putting up the dry wall... no problem, even throwing "mud" on the walls was no issue, but sanding that mud, and adding more and resanding was very very painful.

But after I got to a point where I didn't care I decided it was good enough, and that I would add some texture to the paint, and no one would be the wiser.

At the same time, my mom decided to move so I had some extra office furniture at my disposable. I am also fortunate enough to have friends with some interior design skills (or just good taste) that helped me lay out the room. All in all I would say it is a great improvement, and I will be posting a final video shortly.

My old boss at Symantec proposed that this is the best opening sentence ever:

A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.

full article...

So, my friend at work, Mike, showed me Synergy today. PRETTY FREAKING COOL! It is not ready for prime time yet, as the UI is a little clunky, but the functionality works and allows me to just use one keyboard and mouse to control the laptop and computer at my desk. It is different then the hardware needed like a Belkin, and it doesn't allow you to use the same monitor for multiple computers, but it does allow you to make all monitors aware of each other, so that your mouse can jump from screen to screen to screen, regardless of your operating system.

And best of all... it is free!

Rush: Koders benefits from Google attention by ZDNet's Ed Burnette -- An estimated 20-25% of a developer's time is spent looking for answers to problems others have already encountered (and perhaps solved). That's the time Darren Rush, CEO and co-founder of Koders.com, is trying to help you save. In this exclusive interview, Darren shares his insights on code searching, open source license proliferation, and what it's like to have your niche invaded by a big company like Google.

For any of you living in the Silicon Valley, you should go check out my friend Darren at the Code Camp this weekend at the Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.

For those of you that don't know. I took a job at Koders, Inc. The adventure with my step-father, VyMed Data Services, do not work out as I hoped, but I feel like I am in a better place now.

Koders was started by a fraternity brother of mine at Georgia Tech. He started it around 2 years ago, and we are having some great success now as a company, too early to talk about some of them now, but hopefully I will be able to point you to some press releases soon.

But I wanted to talk about the basics of what you need to work from home, aka telecommute. Our team consists of people in Santa Monica, CA, one person in San Francisco, CA, a few developers in St Petersberg, Russia, and myself in Jacksonville, FL. So how do we keep up the communication while keeping the costs down?

Answer: Skype and GoToMeeting.

Skype is a free IP based service that lets you call other Skype users as well as other land based phones. We sometimes hold sales calls with skype. It also supports video calls, so I am virtually in the room with the other developers most of the day, because they have a dedicated computer setup to host a "Max Headroom" version of myself.

And then when it comes to do paired programming or when I need help, I simple create a GoToMeeting session and share my screen so that others can view it while we talk about thing over Skype. I can also give them control over my computer so that they can control my keyboard and mouse from their computer.

The total cost of this setup for a year is $39 a month.