Startup in 3 days aka #startupweekendkl2010

I got a chance to join Startup Weekend KL 2010 last weekend, thanks to Daniel Cerventus. The idea of Startup Weekend is to launch a startup within 54 hours. It is a place where aspiring entrepreneurs share and grow their idea, and hopefully launch a startup by the end of the program.

We start by sharing our idea on Friday and form a team on the same day. On Saturday we begin to work on our idea, with whatever we have, some work on presentation, some doing business plan, some codes. We also have visits from Mentors to guide us our way to the business . This continue until the end of Sunday where we will pitch to Mentors which already launch their own startups before.

I join a team called, findmiddle.com. We produce a webapp that recommend place for meetup based on a center point from 2 location. Our team is awesome in a way that we are one of the very few team that manage to produce a product in the end of the day, we also have a balance team, where we have techie and business guy.

What I learn on the day on startups.

• Get a balance team, we got a combination of tech and business, builder and speaker.
• Keep it small, so that we can focus, so that we can build it fast
• Web api is free and useful, use it. It would be impossible to build findmiddle without google map, 4sq api and bit.ly api.
• Cloud based collaboration tools is free and useful. We use gdoc, dropbox, and google analytics.
• Open Source Software is easily available, and is full of libraries. We use a php, jquery and php mailer.
• Tech doesn't matter, who can use the tools fast, rules. I prefer python, but we got 2 php guy in the team, so findmiddle.com is on php. 
• Web hosting is cheap, few hundreds Ringgits. Nuff said
• Human attention span is short, make a pitch short and interesting. 
• Talk is cheap. Implementing findmiddle is not without bumps, but in the end it worth it. 
• Murphy's Law is everywhere.

In the end, I would like to thank, all the organizer of startup weekend in kl. I have learn a lot, and it is a interesting experience. Sorry for the wordy story, I forget to bring my camera.

Learn more about startup weekend here
http://startupweekend.org/

You can look at our slide here
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0ARiCz9gqQzLNZGM1d3RxYnFfNmZwODVxd2Ny&hl=en

Photo is here, thanks to vivian
http://picasaweb.google.com/GEWMY2010/StartupWeekendKL02

We have a facebook group in
http://on.fb.me/startupweekendkl

Our product is in
findmiddle.com

Meetup with Graham Dumpleton

Hi 

Everyone is invited for a meetup with Graham Dumpleton, he is the developer of modwsgi, a implementation of WSGI standard for as a apache module . WSGI is a interface for python web application in accordance with PEP333 

Details

Date: 16th October 2010

Time: 2.00 PM 

Location: Hackerspacekl Damansara Uptown

Anyone that is interested, join us.  

fun with python mechanize

In the Perl world, there is WWW-mechanize module which is used as a web browser in perl to use to get load a webpage. In python there is a mechanize module that do precisely that.

To install just:
pip install mechanize

Lets assume that we have a webapp at address http://mywebapp

here

The code above shows how to open a page, fill in a form field, and submit it, and get the next page. It will print whole page in html, from the result of a query .

This is useful for automate access to a webpage, in my case, to test a webapp in the office. I also use this to do load test with the python multi mechanize. Pretty nifty as it is actually a browser itself.

Setting up a python environment on windows

One advantage of working in current company each got a laptop. But like most IT company in Malaysia, it uses windows. In the job I ssh to a linux dev server for work, for personal project in python to be done locally, and setting up python on windows is a pain.

The common way to install python on windows is

1. download python from python.org
2. install
3. setup the path

And repeat the process for setuptools, and virtualenv, it is a pain because not just have to setup the path, and have to go to a page to install it.

Another way is to use active python. Which is free, and their community license is pretty acceptable. And the best of all, it bundle with easy_install, pip, virtualenv and the path is done for us properly. You can download it here