1 hr 25 min
Johnny Boursiquot on building a software agency from scratch, learning Go for Rubyists, and server-less software architectures. Hacker Practice: GROWTH, SYSTEMS, and RISK for Startups and SMB
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- Technology
Sometimes you start a conversation with one intention, and digress into something completely different.
This happened to me recently, in a conversation with an old friend and mentor, Johnny Boursiquot.
Johnny and I were supposed to do a deep dive into Go Lang and Ruby in this hour long conversation. Instead we spent half an hour talking about Johnny's experience building a technology agency from scratch.
Then we got around to talking tech XD.
Johnny is well-known as one of the pillars of BostonRB. He also helped to organize the Boston GoLang meetup before moving to Maryland where he founded Baltimore's GoLang Meetup.
He was listed on New Relic's list of 18 Go Experts to Follow Online.
In the episode we talk about:
Johnny’s lessons learned from founding and building a tech agency, lots of juicy business advice for consulting companies and agencies in the first half of this talk The relative pros and cons of using ruby vs go in different domains How to get started using a new language
A quick primer in serverless application architectures
How intermediate devs can 10x their workflow
And a lot more
Enjoy
Notes [00:00] What brings Johnny to Maryland after living more than a decade in Boston
What brought him to Boston in the first place [02:30] Major lessons learned from time in Boston running a technology company
Running a company means that you’re responsible for other people’s income Many unexpected challenges: biz dev, legal, etc [05:15] How did Johnny get started in technology business.
Started with entrepreneurship in high school [08:00] Learning how to do business
Dealing with clients Managing expectation Touching on the difference between hacking and building a product [11:00] #1 Lesson? The difference between a service business and product business
Agencies do not scale the same way a product scales Most agencies do not end up producing a lot of reusable technology or internal products It’s hard to do internal product development because your staff is busy with revenue generating service activities It’s risky to invest in product development [20:00] What would Johnny do differently if he could start over?
Start a product company: raise money. [23:00] What about the reverse situation? Making a profitable, successful agency.
Protect your margins Be flexible with workflow; Agile doesn’t always work smoothly in an agency environment “They want warez” Your job is to tease out the specifics of what the client actually wants “You’re not in control of your own product roadmap” [27:30] How to mitigate risk of scope creep
Establish a relationship; a partnership to guarantee future work Get a Master Services Agreement [32:00] Segue to technical discussion. What is Ruby good for vs Golang?
Ruby for developing something fast. “Getting a web app out there as fast as possible” GoLang is better for heavy lifting, whenever performance is a consideration [37:45] What are Johnny’s tips for learning Go (or any language)
“Leave baggage at the door...appreciate the differences of Go” There is a “Go Way” of doing things [41:15] What kind of project should I try using GO in
Anything with heavy duty network requirements Microservices (“Something you can throw away”) “Gnarly, performance-critical jobs” Concurrency in Go is super-awesome [45:00] AWS Lambda and Serverless 101
Not actually “serverless”. That’s a marketing term. There is always a server somewhere. Monolithic App > Microservices > Lambda functions Everything is a discrete functional unit Very cost-effective because the server only runs when you call the function [51:30] What can an intermediate Rails developer to 10-20x their workflow
Look past the magic of the language (Ruby) or framework (Rails) Learn the underlying properties of the WYSIWYG Understand how SQL, HTTP, Databases, and CURL -- fundamentals of the web -- work Learning the underlying complexity enables you to
Sometimes you start a conversation with one intention, and digress into something completely different.
This happened to me recently, in a conversation with an old friend and mentor, Johnny Boursiquot.
Johnny and I were supposed to do a deep dive into Go Lang and Ruby in this hour long conversation. Instead we spent half an hour talking about Johnny's experience building a technology agency from scratch.
Then we got around to talking tech XD.
Johnny is well-known as one of the pillars of BostonRB. He also helped to organize the Boston GoLang meetup before moving to Maryland where he founded Baltimore's GoLang Meetup.
He was listed on New Relic's list of 18 Go Experts to Follow Online.
In the episode we talk about:
Johnny’s lessons learned from founding and building a tech agency, lots of juicy business advice for consulting companies and agencies in the first half of this talk The relative pros and cons of using ruby vs go in different domains How to get started using a new language
A quick primer in serverless application architectures
How intermediate devs can 10x their workflow
And a lot more
Enjoy
Notes [00:00] What brings Johnny to Maryland after living more than a decade in Boston
What brought him to Boston in the first place [02:30] Major lessons learned from time in Boston running a technology company
Running a company means that you’re responsible for other people’s income Many unexpected challenges: biz dev, legal, etc [05:15] How did Johnny get started in technology business.
Started with entrepreneurship in high school [08:00] Learning how to do business
Dealing with clients Managing expectation Touching on the difference between hacking and building a product [11:00] #1 Lesson? The difference between a service business and product business
Agencies do not scale the same way a product scales Most agencies do not end up producing a lot of reusable technology or internal products It’s hard to do internal product development because your staff is busy with revenue generating service activities It’s risky to invest in product development [20:00] What would Johnny do differently if he could start over?
Start a product company: raise money. [23:00] What about the reverse situation? Making a profitable, successful agency.
Protect your margins Be flexible with workflow; Agile doesn’t always work smoothly in an agency environment “They want warez” Your job is to tease out the specifics of what the client actually wants “You’re not in control of your own product roadmap” [27:30] How to mitigate risk of scope creep
Establish a relationship; a partnership to guarantee future work Get a Master Services Agreement [32:00] Segue to technical discussion. What is Ruby good for vs Golang?
Ruby for developing something fast. “Getting a web app out there as fast as possible” GoLang is better for heavy lifting, whenever performance is a consideration [37:45] What are Johnny’s tips for learning Go (or any language)
“Leave baggage at the door...appreciate the differences of Go” There is a “Go Way” of doing things [41:15] What kind of project should I try using GO in
Anything with heavy duty network requirements Microservices (“Something you can throw away”) “Gnarly, performance-critical jobs” Concurrency in Go is super-awesome [45:00] AWS Lambda and Serverless 101
Not actually “serverless”. That’s a marketing term. There is always a server somewhere. Monolithic App > Microservices > Lambda functions Everything is a discrete functional unit Very cost-effective because the server only runs when you call the function [51:30] What can an intermediate Rails developer to 10-20x their workflow
Look past the magic of the language (Ruby) or framework (Rails) Learn the underlying properties of the WYSIWYG Understand how SQL, HTTP, Databases, and CURL -- fundamentals of the web -- work Learning the underlying complexity enables you to
1 hr 25 min