Shiny Reports

Recently redbook.me got a cool new feature - reports! This is something that I’ve wanted to include for a while in the product, but hadn’t due to the difficulty of implementing it on the old architecture. With the new backend, however, implementing new features has been really fast so; reports!

Screenshot of the labour report

For now I’ve only built one report but I think its one of the more important ones - the labour cost trend. This allows managers/owners to look at how the weekly labour costs is trending over time. This is a very useful tool that allows identification of labour usage patterns that might not be otherwise evident - especially if you are tracking it against gross earnings. It can be helpful when building new rosters also, as it helps gauge the consistency with previous weeks.

Some of the reports I’d like to build in the near future are:

• Average Labour Cost by day of the week - this will show the average relative cost of labour between each day of the week.

• Rostered Hours Trend Report - similar to the labour cost trend report, but using hours instead of cost

Nerd Stuff

In this section I’ll give a quick overview of how the reports were implemented.

For presentation of the charts, I used the Google Charts API. Implementing the charts was fairly simple but it’s clear that there is a lot functionality offered that I have yet to take advantage of ;-). While I’m going to try not to put charts everywhere, I think there is room for their use in a number parts of redbook.me.

Working towards customer number 2

Monday was an important day for redbook.me and me. My first customer allowed me to throw the switch, transitioning his staff over to the the new site which they had been in testing for almost a month. Officially turning redbook.me operational. Thankfully, all went quite well. Other than a few data syncing issues between the old and new database, staff started using the new site.

The reason this event was important to me was because I’ve been working on what is now known as redbook.me for over a year. Slowly, slowly building it up to its current form. So for people to finally be using it in a production environment is very exciting! What I am also hoping is that it will provide a number of learnings - do people use it the way I expected? what things should I be improving? will there be a revolt?

In addition to all this, I’m ready to sign up customer number two. I want to share what I’ve built with more people and I want to learn how to make it better, quicker; this is something more customers will enable.

So how do I get more customers? Well I’ve started a few initiatives. The easiest things I could do was to start advertising online - so I’ve bought Google Ads on some keywords that I hope will bring interest. While this gets redbook.me some traffic, I don’t think this is going to be the most effective way to get my second customer - no one has contacted me for a trial yet.
I think the best way to get another customer is (sadly for the introverted me) to go out and talk to managers and staff in the workplace. Other than the fact that I’ll be about 2 miles out of my comfort zone, working full time and doing these “sales” calls is going to be a challenge… so it looks like I’m going to be doing some weekend shop hopping!

redbook.me has an API?

redbook.me has recently undergone a fairly significant overhaul of its underlying codebase. When I built redbook initially a few years ago it was flat, very flat. The backend of redbook.me is written in PHP and I’m ashamed to say that while it worked fine, I had a PHP for every page and some core functions in a common file. Code duplication everywhere and not a class in sight!

When I decided to go back and improve redbook.me, the first thing I thought to do was to rewrite everything from scratch. And I tried. But the task proved to be just a little bit too big. So I took the iterative approach - slowly improving the existing code with a direction towards better practice.

The situation has improved significantly over the last few months and recently it has taken a substantial jump. redbook.me now uses lots of the new shiny features of PHP 5.3 including, namespaces, PHP5 classes, etc. In addition, I’ve restructured the code so that it uses something close to a Model, View, Controller (MVC) object oriented design.

When making the improvements I drew inspiration from projects such as Ruby on Rails and Symfony2. Actually, I’m using some of the Symfony2 components in redbook.me to handle HTTP requests and sessions. No sense reinventing the wheel!

So what does all this mean? Well now that redbook.me is built to better industry standards, the speed that I can improve it has increased considerably. Also, the site just runs better (shocking!). A pretty awesome side effect of the new structure is that I actually ended up with an API. The frontend javascript is already using it, I just hadn’t looked at it that way before. What this means is that redbook.me can easily be extended to other interfaces such as iPhone, Android, etc without significant changes to the backend code. I could even allow public access to the API for third parties.

I feel like I’ve discovered all these benefits of object oriented design a bit late but hey, better late than never! The effect these improvements has had on my enthusiasm for improving the product is pretty strong. Indeed, I’ve even decided to start commercialising! Check out redbook.me.

Marketing & redbook.me

Lately I’ve been struggling with a bit of an obsession. I’ve mentioned previously (here) that I built an availability and roster system for the pizza shop I used to work for. Well, the project has slowly been digging its claws into me and I’ve been spending quite a deal of time on it. I’ve made a heap of improvements to the underlying architecture (it’s really stable and fast!), but also I’m starting to think a bit more commercially. Basically, I think the product is finally at the stage where I believe other businesses could use it - that is, in addition to the shop I used to work at ;-).

The application has always been referred to as “Redbook” because before it existed, we did actually use a red book to record when staff were and weren’t available. I’d been fighting against keeping the name for a while because I was afraid other’s wouldn’t get it. Recently, however, I changed my mind and decided to go with it. Hence, I submit to you redbook.me - the product page for my web app. (It’s got a cool Web2.0 sounding name and everything! :-P)

The redbook.me page is intended to be super simple and describe the product - what it does, how much it costs, etc. My sincere hope is that it will get some interest and I’ll be able to share redbook.me with other people.

I believe that redbook.me is really useful and that business owners and their staff, espically in the hospitality industry, will greatly benifit from using it. If you’re so inclined, I would appreciate any comments you have on the product or the page.

Red Wine Experiments

For a while now I have been aware of my lack of knowledge of wine. For the most part my consumption of alcohol has been limited to beer and spirits - mostly Scotch and Bourbon. Wine is a little daunting… perhaps its the culture, the number of types and brands or maybe its just that you don’t want to be associated with some “wine snob”.

Lately, I have taken the plunge into trying red wine. One of the advantages of wine is that relatively cheap and depending on the day of the week, good for you (red wine at least). So basically I’ve resolved to trying a bottle every so often to get a feel.

So what have I tried so far? So far I’ve tried two Pinot Nior red wines. First one was a 2008 Monkey Bay and the second one (pictured) was a 2009 Jacob’s Creek. Both were about $15 a bottle and went down fairly nicely. Of the two, I found the Jacob’s Creek slightly easier to drink.

So where to from here?

My plan is to try a few more Pinot Noir’s and at the same time try and find out what the next step is….

On a completely unrelated note, I have also dived into Instragram lately and am finding it incredibly easy and natural to use. I think it’s the simplicity… just take a photo, do something funky with in using a filter, share with Instragram and optionally other services. You may have guessed that the photo above is taken with Instragram ;-)

Backend Selection Issues

For the last couple of weeks I've been struggling with a problem with the roster management application I'm building. As I've mentioned before, I've already got a working version of the app running, but I'm not happy with how its built and am trying to do an overhaul.

I have made a little progress with the front end - I've been playing with Twitter's Bootstrap CSS for the styling and using jQuery for the front end programming. Here's a quick screenshot of part of what I've come up with.

What I've been stumped by lately however is how to approach the backend. Currently the application runs on a basic LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but I am thinking that perhaps better solutions exist for what I am trying to do. One of the options I've been suggested is to use Google's Appengine platform. I really am interested in this, but its a bit of a change from the style of web development I'm used to - it's built on Java (and Python) which I know, but am not as experienced in as PHP and it uses an object-style datastore (kinda NoSQL) instead of the traditional MySQL table style database that I'm used to.

Basically, I can't decide which approach to take. I can either go the route I'm used to (PHP + MySQL) which has the added advantage of being easier to deploy more places, or use Appengine which is possibly more suited to the application in terms of data stores but a less familiar language and lesser in deployment options. Of course, there are probably other options I have yet to think of yet which could complicate the decision even more.

So what should I do? I'd really appreciate some feedback if you have any experience in this field. At the moment I'm leaning towards going the LAMP option due to it possibly leading to quicker development..

I want to Cowork

One of the things I’ve seen, and would really like to do at some point during my career is Cowork. Coworking is where people can come to work in a shared office or workspace as an alternative to working in a corporate office or from home. It has a few advantages such as freedom, progressional networking, inspiration, and for the who would otherwise be working form home - company.

I’ve been really interested in coworking for a while now but, sadly, I have yet to get myself into the position where I can do it. Currently I work in Nerang, Queensland, which involves a fairly significant commute for me and the ability to work somewhere other than my office would be fantastic. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my work and the draconian security restrictions of my employer’s network its not really something I can easily do.

There is a small chance, however, that sometime in the future I’ll be working for someone that will enable me to cowork - even if its only part-time - or better yet, I’ll be working for myself. It’s the latter that I’m really excited about. If fact, if I am successful in starting my own business I have every intention of coworking. Or perhaps renting some office space and opening it up for others to use as a coworking space - there’s even an opportunity to turn that itself into a business.

Lately I’ve been quite seriously toying with the idea of renting some close-to-city office space and turning it into a coworking space as a for (small) profit exercise. There a few of these coworking operations currently running is Brisbane, but not many - especially compared to somewhere like San Francisco. Two notable locations are:

• The Thought Fort
• Salt House

Both of these locations offer the ability to casually rent a desk for a day as well as better priced, more permanent desks. I think there are seriously good business opportunities in this space, and I’m seriously keen to get in on the action. Sadly, for me to do this alone, I am not quite financially gifted as yet - though I have quite number of good ideas that I think could make this successful.

So this is where I ask anyone who thinks they could also see the potential in this sort of thing to contact me, and if I’m lucky perhaps I can get coworking after all!

If you are actually interested, please contact me at chris@rednesstech.com

Redness Tech - Experiments

Some of you may know that in addition to my normal day-to-day job, I run a very small (and very low revenue) business. The business is called Redness Tech, and it’s current primary activity is the operation of a web-based roster management system - Redness Tech Roster Management System (RTRMS). This is actually the same product I referred to in my recent blog post Search for a Business Partner - I haven’t had many hits on that either, sadly.

In an effort to get a better face on the business and the product, I have recently been experimenting with getting logos and web design by way of outsourcing. While I do hope that these efforts may translate into some more business, I’m mostly doing this for a little bit of fun and curiosity. The reason I am outsourcing these activities is because I just don’t have the time or energy to do it all myself… and that I don’t have some of the skill required.

So what have I done? Firstly, I’ve updated the Redness Tech logo from this:

To this:

It’s nothing really spectacular, but I’m quite happy with it. And, it only cost me $US 35, and I was provided with many revisions to choose from.

With this new logo received, I also took the opportunity to tweak the business website a bit - mainly updating the colours to match those from the logo. Considering how it started off, I think its an improvement. Check it out here - and please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I’m also experimenting with outsourcing some of the web design for the Roster Management System. This hasn’t been quite as successful, I think due to language barriers (most of the contractors are Indian) and possibly vague instructions. Time will tell, and at the very least it will be a learning experience.

So how has this “outsourcing” actually being done? Let me introduce you to Elance. Elance is a marketplace for trading services - you can post up jobs for free and allow contractors (who have to pay) to bid on that job. The type of jobs range from virtual assistants to web design to legal etc. What I am learning quite quickly, however, is that while you can get things done very cheaply sometimes, you do get what you pay for…

If you have a little bit of money lying around and are curious, I seriously suggest trying something like this.

Some Interesting Websites

One of the things I really enjoy is discovering and trying out new websites and services on the internet. So I thought I’d post a few of my favourites / recent discoveries.

Console.fm

This website allows you to stream a playlist of music from different electronic genres. It’s very simple, and I’m not actually sure how they make money, but if you’re stuck without your own music its great.

Codecademy

This is one of the recent sites from Y Cominator that seems to be a platform for teaching people how to code. It seems pretty scant on the courses at the moment, but it has a very clean interface and the tutorials are quite nice. One to watch I suppose!

Stypi

Here’s another Y Combinator child - Stypi is a really sleek online collaborative editor with chat. It has a few features from Google’s Wave platform, like a “Playback” feature an simulatenous editing. It seems to be aimed a little towards the programmer user given it allows for code highlighting etc - but I think that people just needing plain text collaboration would find this massively useful also!

Jig

Jig has just launched services from Tasy Labs and seems to be a “need marketplace”. It lets people post “needs” as well as suggest solutions for other peoples “needs”. Its an interesting spin on traditional “post everything” networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. My profile is here.

Zerply

A very pretty “about me” type site. Allows you to have a profile page about yourself - can fetch from LinkedIn etc. Here’s mine

Workflowy

Workflowy is probably my favourite - and most heavily used - website at the moment. It’s motto, “Organise Your Brain”, is exactly what it does. It basically a sleek interface to bullet point lists. The lists are nestable, which means you can have lists of lists of lists etc. Additionally, to cut down on information overload, you are able to zoom in so that only a sublist is shown. You can also share lists and make them editable by others if you wish.

I use workflowy for a heap of things - A todo list, knowledge base, organiser, collaboration, brain storming, etc. I seriously encourage you to check it out ;-)

I hope you get the chance to check some of these sites out, and perhaps even use them for a bit. I think I’m going to do posts like this on a more regular basis so let me know what you think. Also, if you have any really cool sites that you think I should check out, let me know!

Search for a Business Partner

For a little while now, I’ve been running a very small business that provides a web-based roster management system for two pizza stores. I developed the application myself while actually employed at these stores, and after leaving, allowed the owner to continue using it for a monthly fee.

The plan was to use these two stores as a testbed to improve application and eventually get it to a point where I could market it to other small businesses. However, due to a lack of time and energy on my part, this plan hasn’t quite come to fuition.

My hopeful solution to this problem is, simply, to get some help. I haven’t kept this project going in the hopes that I might get rich from it - rather I was hoping to use it as a learning experience both technically (the application itself) and commercially (how to run a small business). Taking this into account, I can see no harm - in fact I see a necessity - in getting someone else on board to give me a hand.

So what am I actually looking for? I am looking for someone similar to myself - i.e someone looking to learn by doing about running a small business as well as building a software application. Surely, somewhere there is is a person out there looking for a small project to work on - I know I would be (and perhaps have in moments of weakness). I can’t promise any immediate financial compensation, but depending on how things go I am more than willing to talk formal partnerships and profit sharing.

Some background on the product:

• Built in PHP - and not some of my best work if I’m honest
• Uses some jQuery on the frontend, but nothing major.
• Using MySQL for a database
• Code comments could be improvement
• Currently running on Jumba Web hosting
• It works - but isn’t particularly pretty
• Handles rosters and availabilities for two stores currently - each staff member is able to login and enter the days they can work.
• I have started an overhaul project to clean up the code and make it more functional - this is running on a VPS

I am very keen to talk to anyone that is interested, but I really am looking for someone who could see themselves committing to this project at least as much as myself. Feel free to ask as many question as required.

On a side note, I will be putting this post (or at least a link) onto a few services to getting a better change of engagement. If you know of anyone who could be interested, please let them (or me) know!