Posts

Four years and one month ago on January 27, 2008, I released a cool little weekend project into the wild known as TweetStats.com. Born out of a simple perl script that helped me visualize how I had started to use Twitter, I found that there were a lot of people out there that also wanted to see how they used Twitter and who they were talking to. The site took off and I found myself spending all waking and non-working hours tweaking it and thinking about other cool things I could do better. ...

Over the past four years of being on Twitter, I’ve slowly turned on SMS notifications for people that I wanted to keep up-to-date on. This worked great when I had a few people that occasionally tweeted - I could see what they were up to in a passive manner and reply if I wanted to. Unfortunately, as this list grew, so did the uselessness of text notifications on my phone. At one point in the past year, I turned off vibrate notifications for SMS messages Unfortunately, this meant that while my phone wasn’t vibrating every other minute from Twitter notifications, it also meant that my phone wasn’t vibrating when friends would try to reach me via SMS. ...

I had the pleasure of speaking at Mongo Seattle a few weeks back on how I use MongoDB for real-time data collection and analytics. The presentation ended up being a comparison of how I previously built TweetStats on top of MySQL and the terrible SQL queries that still power it to this day to how I would build it if I were using MongoDB. I also gave a couple use cases of how I’ve used MongoDB to power a game-based link shortener as well as my current primary focus, RowFeeder. I’ve you’d like a walk-through of MongoDB’s atomic incrementors and some map-reduce goodness, check out the slides below. ...

Live life. If there’s one motto I can hope to live by, it’s those simple two words. Just under 2 years ago, I quit my comfy security consulting job to “do my own thing.” Since then, I’ve started two companies and even though every day brings a new challenge, I couldn’t be happier. Running a startup (or any company) is no easy task. You are, more so than ever before, married to your work. If you fail, your company fails. And you can’t sprint fast enough to keep up with all the demands. And your personal life will suffer. Relationships will be strained, nights out with friends will be missed. If you’re not working on your startup, you’re thinking about your startup. ...

Dear Mom, I can’t even remember the first time you were there for me. But I know you were, before anybody else. I got an email tonight that brought tears to my eyes. It was the simplest, but best email ever. It said (paraphrased): “Dear Damon, I love you. Thank you for sharing your life online so I can follow along.” But really? How much does that suck? Should my mother really have to follow along in my life based on the status updates I post to my social network? Shouldn’t she know everything already?! I feel bad, because I only call once every few weeks. Because you, my mother, have to live my life online, only through the details I provide. This is not fair. ...

Life. It’s an interesting journey. And as my friend @JoeCascio mentioned today, “life is what happens while you’re making plans.” I’ve rarely been one to make plans. I prefer to live in the moment and enjoy life as it happens. Yes, I do make some plans but I try to remain open and accepting of the curve balls we receive on a daily basis. I feel the best we can do is enjoy life and react to the different hands we get dealt. My father instilled this belief in me and I’ve talked about his approach to attitude before. I really cannot thank my father enough for embedding within me the right attitude necessary to tackle life. ...

This is a picture of me, from 12 years ago, explaining to my Independent Studies Program advisor how my friend (Jasper Speicher) and I were going to build a robot that could automatically navigate it’s environment using infrared sensors. And if we were lucky, even climb stairs. The brains of this device were going to be a programmable microcontroller called the BASIC Stamp. ...

I’ve been working on this for a while, but figured I should announce it here. I’m starting a new company to continue my hobby of building Twitter tools. It’s going to be a social media startup and we’ll be building tools for social media professionals. We’ve already built one in a weekend project that we’re calling RowFeeder - a tool to stream real-time tweets into a Google spreadsheet. It’s something we needed and it’s been surprisingly helpful. ...

This is a continuation of a tweet. Even in the past 3 days, my reading habits have changed. Still sucking up massive amounts of information, just different types. There’s an interesting transition I’m going through. I moved to Seattle over three years ago. One of the reasons I moved was the awesome security community, like toorcon and the great security shops here in town. But I’m staying because of the awesome startup community. ...

Well, I’m about 45 minutes late on this, but I did want to mention that two years ago on December 27, 2007, I released the first version of my Twitter Stats script. It was a hack. It scraped the twitter.com website. It was in perl. It exported into your clipboard. And the data had to be pasted into a Numbers template. But it worked. And it was the beginning of a long journey that is culminating in something I’m going to announce tomorrow/today. ...