I'm a serial startup founder that has yet to hit it "bigtime". (I am not sure that I entirely want to, as it doesn't always seem to bode well for the company founders. But I digress.)
My main business entity consists of my co-founder and myself, and we own a half-dozen sub-entities, each of which is remarkable in that they are all equally more or less profitable (or not profitable, much, at all, depending on which way you want to look at things.)
We work very hard to obtain and retain clients, and most of our work revolves around building websites for small businesses. I am adept at PHP programming (11+ years) but much prefer to program in Perl (with Catalyst as my framework for web apps) to do heavy lifting.
That being said, since most of our clients generally choose one of our preferred open-source CMS solutions, I don't typically have to do much programming in either PHP or Perl to get our projects done. Mostly, I develop custom themes, install and configure plug-ins and modules, and provide branding expertise to our clients, while developing the sites in WordPress, Geeklog, Drupal, Joomla, or whatever-floats-their-boat.
Unsurprisingly, not very many clients of ours have the need or desire to invest in a 100% custom-coded Catalyst application for their website, which is fine by me. We are able to meet 90% of our client's needs with the aforementioned CMS solutions, in any case, and it's almost certainly much faster than it would be if we were coding custom apps for each clients (not to mention, much, much cheaper for the client.)
Sometimes I do miss getting my hands dirty doing hardcore object-oriented web application/Perl development. When that happens, though, I generally just check out one of our company's internal projects from our Subversion repository and see where I last left it. It's super fun to be able to develop a dozen websites that we own and host on our own servers, even if they're not exactly cash cows.
I guess it mostly works out ok, though, because work is steady if not stellar, clients are relatively stable, our projects are almost always successful, my business partner is a scholar and a gentlemen and is also very accommodating when it comes to things like taking the day off to play disc golf, re-investing some of our profits in more powerful servers, workstations, domains, etc, and is also pretty hilarious and a great guitar player, to boot. So running a startup is nothing if not entirely entertaining.
Also, he didn't require me to have a cell phone to be in business with him, which is cool, because I don't really enjoy cell phones as much as most people seem to (although I reluctantly just acquired one, and so far it's working out decently. I don't know if I like people being able to reach me all the time, but I suppose I can just ignore their calls if it gets to be too much.)
I like CSS. I like CakePHP, but prefer Symfony. And I like Catalyst waaaaay better than anything I've seen with PHP.
I like RSS. I like Plagger. I love WordPress. I don't mind Drupal, don't care much for Joomla, kind of miss using Geeklog, and have probably used whatever CMS you're currently thinking that I left out.
I used to read Slashdot, and Kuro5hin, and I blog in a bunch of different locations. Now I read Reddit sometimes, and also HN, obviously, but mostly I've been lurking around HN for many moons without signing up for an account, although somebody said some stuff today in some comments that I wanted to respond to, so I finally signed up for an account.
I think Perl code can be a heinous nightmare, especially other people's code, but I also think that well-educated and motivated Perl programming teams can generally arrive at rather sophisticated approaches for solving Perl's more problematic issues, and that if you get the right Perl people together, they will probably out-code just about everybody, including Django and Rails folk (but possibly not counting Haskell and/or Lisp folk.)
I do some database design work, and have become fairly adept at working with Perl's DBI (as well as accessing various DB's from PHP, which isn't nearly as fun or exciting to me for some reason.) I try to follow general RDBMS design best practices (whatever that means) and make sure that my designs are correctly normalized and whatnot.
(E.F. Codd, bless your soul, wherever you are now.)
I use OpenBSD on my IBM Thinkpad and also on all of our company's servers, and really couldn't ask for a better operating system for heavy lifting.
But I also really like Mac OS X quite a bit and am looking forward to acquiring a new Intel-based Mac workstation sometime in the near future. I use OS X where OpenBSD isn't so great, for instance, for multi-tracking, mixing, and mastering music, for playing around with various Adobe software when I'm feeling fancy (and when I get tired of the GIMP being dog-slow and painfully crashy when working on largish image files) and am very pleased about the fact that I haven't felt obligated to us a Microsoft Windows computer of any kind for many moons.
I do not hate Bill Gates nor am I insanely jealous of him or whatnot. Weirdly, I think he's an all right guy, but I think maybe he's in a little over his head at this point. Also, I think Internet Explorer is hilariously awful software and I'm really glad I don't have to use it any more.
Usually as a web developer you'd think I'd care about I.E. issues a little bit, but I don't really at all, much. I guess that if I was inflicted with I.E. for some reason I'd probably complain about it (shakes fist "it doesn't follow W3C standards at all, damn you Bill Gates! etc etc") except that as I just said, I don't have to use any Microsoft software at all anywhere in my life, so I am pretty much a happy camper, and as Douglas Adams would have said, I.E. is Somebody Else's Problem now.
Oh, yeah, I guess Open Source was indeed a revolutionary movement at the time (maybe it still is? I dunno.) because I couldn't do anything with computers at all were it not for the generosity and forward-thinking members of the Open Source community. (I am being completely serious here, I know you think I'm smirking as I write this part, but I'm not. Seriously.)
I rely on Open Source (do I have to keep capitalizing it? I think I am going to write it in lowercase from now on) in almost every single aspect of my life, both professionally and as a hobbiest, and come to think of it, I guess I couldn't do my job at all if it wasn't for open source software, and also, I'm not going to get all fanboyish or anything here, but I have a lot of respect for RMS. He is a very smart, very motivated, and very ethical person, even if that's kind of painted him into a corner these days and it is very tempting to make fun of him (or hate him, I guess) for any number of his foibles/crimes against humanity/zealotry/etc.
I also really like Steve Wozniak quite a bit. He's changed my life in massively positive ways, and I'm not going to gush or anything, but wow. I'd rather hang out with him than Steve Jobs any day of the week, I don't care how big the reality distortion field is.
And I also really respect and admire Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Paul Graham, Philip Greenspun, the Reddit crew, and the various other neat-o inhabitants of planet open source. They are cool people and are welcome to crash on my couch whenever they need to, as long as they are nice to my cat and my girlfriend.
I also really like what Google has done with their opportunity, I think they have a decent culture and ethos and I have come to rely on their work in many small ways over the years. I also hope they don't screw me over like Microsoft did, because they totally could. (Not that Microsoft is the only proprietary software vendor that's ever screwed me over, whether it was intentional or not. Adobe has also moved my cheese on occasion, and even Apple kind of held their customer base in pretty low regard back in the day, although they've certainly cleaned up their act since then. I have a long memory like an elephant though, so if you want to know who else is on my shit list, all you have to do is ask.)
I used to be a systems administrator for a bunch of law firms, and before that, I managed a fleet of laptops, workstations, servers, routers, switches, hubs, and other assorted crap for a gigantic national banking firm. I do not like systems administration very much, though. I do it for our company, of course, but that's about the extent of it these days. I'd rather be building fresh new websites for happy customers any day of the week than try to explain, well, anything else about computers to anybody ever again. Especially lawyers and bankers. Tough crowd.
(I still build websites for lawyers if they ask, though, and am happy to do it for them. Heck, I'm even still friends with some lawyers and bankers, remarkably.)
Our startup(s) has been in existence since 1998, so we're doing Real Well and should be making Lots of Money Real Soon Now. Weirdly, I do not miss working at the bank or being a systems administrator for law firms much at all.
I use Facebook and LinkedIn to hang out in the virtual sense, and I even kind of like Twitter. I don't really know why. I guess since I used the Perl Net::Twitter module to auto-tweet some of my song lyrics to my Twitter account every afternoon, I sort of feel complicit in the whole phenomenon. I don't really read many tweets, though, although that may change since I now have a phone.
Anyway, so, yeah. Here I am. My name is Mark Beihoffer (yep, that's my boring old blog at http://mark.beihoffer.com, seriously, it's my most boring blog, mostly because my mom reads it, but still. Don't read it unless you hate yourself or are truly interested in boring Catalyst fanboy posts) and I hang out here at HN and this About information is sort of almost totally honest, because apparently HN culture is such that people would like to verify the veracity of the information they are receiving from people's comments and whatnot. And also, I suppose people connect with other startup founders here, and what-have-you.
Cool beans.
Oh, also, lastly, I should mention that I am, according to recent medical advice, a little bit off-kilter, specifically, I have full-blown Bipolar Disorder, so, basically I am awake for four days in a row, then I sleep for several days in a row.
This can apparently be irritating to some people who would like me to show up to appointments on time, which I sometimes am unable to do. So if I don't respond to your comments in time and you are eagerly awaiting a flamewar with me, or if I actually do stand you up in real life because we had an honest-to-goodness real-life appointment of some kind or whatever, well, I apologize in advance.
(This does seriously happen sometimes, when I miss Important Meetings because I am asleep for four days in a row. I've gotten used to it by now, but apparently other people have not.)
Anyway, so, yeah. Howdy-do, good day to you!
- Mark Beihoffer
p.s. Oh, sorry if this is too long. I am not sure just how much information to put into text boxes these days. I usually just type until they are full, but this one never got full.
Go figure.
