Brian Alvey

Do you do your Linux in the cloud?

19 days ago

We do!
Craig just posted an open Linux admin job over on Authentic Jobs for Crowd Fusion.
Here are the details:

Crowd Fusion is in need of an experienced contractor for Linux Systems Administration. Ideal candidate has no trouble building custom packages on any flavor of Linux - specifically Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian, optimizing hardware and software configurations, can help diagnose anomalies found by monitoring software, and can recommend solutions when presented with needs assessments.

Experience with Amazon EC2 or RightScale is a plus. In depth knowledge of Apache, MySQL, and PHP configurations is a must.

Crowd Fusion is doing exciting things with Cloud Architecture. We are a geographically diverse / virtual company, made up of people who love what they do; we rely heavily on strong communication skills and interactive tools like Assembla, Campfire, Skype and email. Contractor needs to be able to commit to 10 hours per week and be available at least half of those hours in active collaboration with the Crowd Fusion development team.

Contact Craig Wood, Crowd Fusion CTO at craig [at] crowdfusion (dot) com. Send your hourly contracting rate and CV or Resume to Craig Wood for consideration of the contracting position.
- Permalink
- 0 Comments
My dog died today

26 days ago

Back in 2001 when Niki and I were having tons of fertility trouble -- before we had our three kids -- we did what fertility-challenged couples are not supposed to do. We got a puppy.
Barkley was the first of our three Cavaliers, but she wasn't the first Cavalier we tried to get. Our breeder chatted with me while we were looking at his dogs and I didn't realize I was being tested and I failed. Niki was shocked that I could be so clueless about the "adoption" process. I didn't fail my second test and we got Barkley.
In college, Niki had a high-jumping cat that she named Jordan after Michael Jordan. She had been an MJ fan since his UNC days. So now we had a dog to name and we both enjoyed watching Charles Barkley on TNT, so Barkley it was.
Barkley was the first dog I ever had from a puppy and she was the best.
She was the first dog I ever took to be trained. After a few lessons I figured out how dogs learn, so I decided to skip ahead and I taught Barkley how to shake. The next lesson after I did that, the instructor went on a rant about how laying down and heeling are useful skills but shaking hands is just a circus trick with no practical value. Hah!
Cavaliers commonly have a heart valve defect. Recently that meant Barkley would get fluid in her lungs and in spite of medication she often had trouble breathing. This weekend when we boarded our other two dogs for a July 4th trip to see my family, we took Barkley upstate with us. We knew the outdoor exercise would be less harmful for her than the stress of a lonely weekend at the kennel. Yesterday she had another crisis requiring a doctor visit. Today when she wouldn't even lift her head to eat a treat we knew it was time for her to go.
I miss my circus dog so much.
- Permalink
- 6 Comments
Crowd Fusion for everyone

52 days ago

Last fall at TechCrunch 50 (video here) professional Internet celebrity judge Robert Scoble asked me why I didn't spend time talking about all of the big successful content management systems I'd built in the past. I answered that I only had 6 minutes on stage, so I focused on the product. But at NY Tech Meetup in March I decided to address his question again and tell one of the stories of Crowd Fusion -- how I had built all these other great CMSes that no one in the audience had ever used. There was never going to be an O'Reilly book on the Capgemini CMS or a Blogsmith for Dummies, but maybe we'll see books like that for Crowd Fusion and people everywhere will have the chance to try our platform out.

You can watch a video from the event to hear some of the details of my experiences partnering up with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Calacanis, or just check out the two cool book covers I made for the presentation.

Continue reading Crowd Fusion for everyone ›
- Permalink
- 2 Comments
When you say Crowd Fusion, you've said it all

75 days ago

About a month ago, I heard a beer commercial in my car and decided Crowd Fusion should have a more beer slogany slogan. Our current tagline is "It serves you right." So I tweeted a few new slogan ideas:

I'm thinking about rewriting @crowdfusion's site to sound more like a beer commercial. People like beer commercials.
9:07 AM Apr 7th

Crowd Fusion is brewed with only the finest PHPs and cold-filtered using a node query language that has been in our family for generations.
9:12 AM Apr 7th

@MikeTRose added his own as well as the #cmsbeerads hash tag I forgot:

@frankensite "Straight from the code foothills of the Rockies, delivered ice cold to your browser." #cmsbeerads
9:18 AM Apr 7th

I never think of adding a hashtag when I'm doing a series of tweets. @Baratunde does this. He expects his stuff to go viral. Oh well. Live and learn.
Next, I made fun of Drupal.

More for our site: "Please code responsibly. Friends don't let friends use Drupal." #cmsbeerads
10:06 AM Apr 7th

Then I ended it with my favorite slogan. It still seems like a great fit when you consider that Crowd Fusion does so much more than a blogging platform.

"I don't always blog, but when I do I use Crowd Fusion. Stay snarky, my friends." -- The Most Interesting Blogger In The World #cmsbeerads
10:50 AM Apr 7th
- Permalink
- 0 Comments
You can't coach height

76 days ago

Crowd Fusion needs to add three more solid developers ASAP just to work with our existing customers, but we hire really slowly because these aren't traditional developer jobs.

I mentioned that Craig posted to Authentic Jobs looking for developer talent. That got me thinking about the people we've worked with at Weblogs, Inc., Blogsmith, Netscape and Crowd Fusion who were a successful fit. Many of them had run their own personal consulting businesses or startups before they worked with us. That makes sense. If someone understands how to get enough done to pay their rent each month, how to land new customers while not disappointing existing customers, how to deliver projects on time AND how to do all of that from home, then they've probably got what we need.

Being a developer at Crowd Fusion is not like being a developer at a bank. Crowd Fusion is a totally virtual company. Everyone works from home. There are some downsides to this, like we don't go to lunch together every day and you can't have an assistant come and work out of your house while you're away on a business trip, but the good far outweighs the bad.

37signals talks about the dangers of interruptions in the workplace and even call it the interruption tax. I'm sitting at my desk, trying to get into a problem solving zone, and you come and stand in my doorway because you've got something you need to talk to me about right now. Those interruptions are a killer. Most of the things you want to discuss can wait. Send me an email or a text message. Open a ticket in Assembla and assign it to me. Type your question into our Campfire group chatroom. Just don't stand in my doorway and stare at me.

Continue reading You can't coach height ›
- Permalink
- 7 Comments
Growing Crowd Fusion

76 days ago
Last year we shifted Crowd Fusion's direction and this year it's paying off. Plan A for Crowd Fusion was to be a publisher. We were building a powerful vertical publishing platform, so who better to put it to use than us? That would have been a great plan if the ad economy hadn't collapsed as we launched our first site. So we moved to Plan B: seeing what other companies can do with our publishing platform. We announced our open source beta program at TechCrunch 50 last September (video) and signed our first customer in November. We've also showed off Crowd Fusion on stage in NYC at NYTM and in New Zealand.

Crowd Fusion is in great shape right now. We have more than 1000 people signed up for our beta program and have been able to activate and work with 150 of them. We're working on deployments for three big customers. Our Obsessable and Super Eco sites are humming along -- making great showcases for Crowd Fusion and great labs for testing new platform features.

So what are we doing next?
1. Hiring developers
2. Activating more beta program members
3. Signing up more customers

Really we need to hire more developers before we can activate more beta program members and take on more customers, so hiring developers is our number one priority. I'm reaching out to everyone I know to see if we can't get a bunch of highly-qualified developers in touch with my CTO/partner Craig.

We posted the following job description (which has since expired) to Cameron Moll's great job board Authentic Jobs. Where else should we be looking?

Continue reading Growing Crowd Fusion ›

Open Angel Forum: NYC

111 days ago

On Thursday night I was a co-host of the first New York Open Angel Forum dinner with Charlie O'Donnell, Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley. More than a dozen great local angel investors networked and watched investment pitches over burgers and beer at Dogpatch Labs.

I was at the first OAF dinner in Los Angeles three months ago. Since then they've had events in San Francisco and Boulder and a bunch of the presenting companies have been funded. The NYC event went smoothly and the presentations from HD Cloud, MyNines, Aristotle Circle, Kodingen, Food52 and Up Next were fantastic.

Food52 would make a great Crowd Fusion app. HD Cloud would make a great Crowd Fusion plug-in. Kodingen would be a great way to edit Crowd Fusion sites from a web kiosk.

I'm looking forward to the next NYC OAF event. Our sponsors were actively involved and we got great feedback from everyone who attended. There are half a dozen little things we'll be changing for the next event to make it more efficient.

Thanks everyone!

Continue reading Open Angel Forum: NYC ›

Drinking with the stars

146 days ago

Thursday night while I was waiting for a meeting at the bar at the Four Seasons hotel in L.A. to begin, I had a beer and did some star watching. I wasn't planning on star watching and maybe it doesn't always happen like this there, but it was three nights before the Oscars so I got a mini-preview.

First, Jeremy Piven was at the bar. He walked by me at one point and I said hi and told him I was still upset that they cancelled his show Cupid which ran for only 15 episodes more than a decade ago. He laughed and thanked me, but I'm sure he's happy he was freed up to work on Serendipity, Old School and Entourage.

Then Queen Latifah walked by. Wow. She looked like she had no makeup on and was easily the prettiest woman in the hotel.

Continue reading Drinking with the stars ›

Surprise!

147 days ago

Friday night I flew home from L.A. to make it back in time for the birthday my wife and I share. I landed just after midnight and was wondering if since I was in the air between time zones when March 6 arrived that maybe I hadn't turned 40. No such luck.

I don't remember freaking out when I turned 30, but I definitely had a couple of troubled moments when 40 was approaching. Niki made sure all of that was far from my mind.

Continue reading Surprise! ›

Virgin America was a let down

150 days ago

Normally I fly from the little Westchester airport by my house, but they don't have direct flights to the west coast so I've been using JFK. I had heard great things about Virgin America from friends who were on their inaugural wifi test flight. My good friend Jason uses them and raves about them. So I was excited to try them out today.

My trip had a promising beginning. One of the pilots came out and introduced himself to nearly everyone at the gate and thanked us all for choosing Virgin America. Wow. One teenage girl was so overwhelmed by this that she started crying. Her two friends teased her when he left.

The purple lighting on the planes was cute. It was like being in a nightclub.

I paid the $15 for wifi and plugged my laptop into the outlet under my seat, but there was no power. Being the only passenger in my premium exit row I tried the other underseat outlet. It was also dead.

I asked the crew if there was some kind of trick I was missing. They said that the power rolls through the rows. That it's not always on in every row. That I should just wait. When I got to 21% battery remaining I let them know it wasn't going to happen.

They told me to try unplugging and plugging in again. No luck. They said there was a reset switch they'd try. Also no luck.

Laptop batteries don't last from NY to L.A. I'm no longer excited about my Virgin America flight home, but I will make sure I've got a fully charged battery.

Or maybe I'll just read a book.

UPDATE: My flight home was better. I had power for the entire flight and I got to unwind after a really good business trip with some music videos I would never have seen otherwise.