aeden

Almost, except that you still do have to be conscious of argument and return types. The one thing that still catches me (and I'm a relative newbie in Go, so that's probably why) is attempting to return nil when the return type won't allow it, such as the case when the return type is a string. It feels weird, but at least the compiler catches it so I can fix it and move on.

If your Python (or in my case, Ruby) script is highly procedural then the transition over to Go is quite straightforward. The first production Go app I rolled out followed this pattern (previously a small, procedural Ruby script, now a small, procedural Go app) and I'm quite happy with the results. The resource usage is so much better with Go for this case that it really was the perfect case for switching.

Billing and provisioning. Please oh please let us provision new Heroku accounts. :-)

tl;dr: Save aggressively (for example, 33% of income) to retire quickly. Live frugal for this to work.

Edit: aggressively might be more like 65% of income.

I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall to hear your sales pitch. I don't know the market well enough to know whether they truly would sieze the opportunity to make more profits or not. Anyhow, sorry it didn't work out for you and good luck in your next venture, whatever that may be.

Reading this post I can't help but think that if they had built services that the middlemen needed that they would have succeeded. For example, take the following two quotes:

"We wanted to revolutionise the fine wine industry, a market with many layers of middle men, and one that has traditionally eschewed technology, failing to patch it's many inefficiencies."

"Unfortunately, the service offered by all of these warehouses is poor. Again, we see little technology (basic online systems, preset passwords, refusal to spend money on an SSL certificate), and lots of human errors (such as very expensive wine being moved to the wrong accounts)."

If these statements are true then there are very real pain points here. Selling services to these vendors, solving their pains, is likely where there is money to be made.

My kids are used to it at this point, at least that's what they tell us. Whether it's completely true or not, only they know. We do our best to make sure and move to places that are interesting for them and then to enjoy whatever is around that area as a family.

I'll admit, this has been the toughest thing to deal with. At the moment we've left a sort of breadcrumb trail with family members in various parts of the world (a box here, a box there, almost exclusively with photos). I like the idea of scanning everything, but for those of us born well before digital cameras became the norm, that would be a lot of photos. :-)

FWIW, I have a wife and 4 school-aged kids. :-)

It may sound crazy, but one way to scale down is to move every few years, especially when you pick up the cost of moving. The more you do it the easier it is to cut down on the stuff in your life you don't need. You also can become quite adept at rebuilding your living environment on the cheap with things like Craig's List. Food for thought.

All kinds of love.

In addition to finishing your studies, consider working for a while for one or two startups in entry roles (as opposed to internships). Most internships that I've seen have not been given enough responsibility and insight into the company to really see the mistakes that were made or the decisions that lead to success. Even if the startup fails (and most do) you get to see first-hand how easy it is to screw things up.

FWIW, it took me 15 years of working for others before I felt like I was prepared to start my own company. YMMV.

We use a lot of services at DNSimple. Here are some of them:

Chargify (http://chargify.com/) - recurring billing

Stripe (http://stripe.com/) - payment processing

Librato (https://metrics.librato.com/) - metrics

Mailgun (http://mailgun.com/) - email service

Boundary (http://boundary.com/) - network analysis

Papertrail (http://papertrailapp.com/) - consolidated logging

PagerDuty (http://pagerduty.com/) - alerting

TravisCI Pro (http://travisci.com/) - continuous integration

CodeClimate (http://codeclimate.com) - static code analysis

BugSnag (https://bugsnag.com) - exception tracking

Also, other services that have already been mentioned (like Github, Intercom, Trello, Dropbox, Sendgrid, NewRelic, etc)

Would canned oyster mushrooms work?

Can anyone actually get to the site right now? I was getting database connection errors but now the site is not even responding.

Do you have a link to where you found this? Sounds interesting.

That's a very interesting observation. When you say it should make current clients nervous, what angle are you thinking of? The angle that they should be nervous because GoDaddy had to go to someone else for this type of service or that Verisign is now involved?

It's a fair point (DNSimple is unicast). We're working on building out an Anycast infrastructure, but even that isn't a guarantee for surviving a DDoS. Bottom line on a DDoS: it's a war of bandwidth and the enemy has all the advantages. If you must buy bandwidth and you get DDoS'd you have to pay for that bandwidth, which can be very expensive (not to mention the ongoing operational costs and the ).

Still, we're going to do our best to switch over to Anycast and continue building out our infrastructure as we have the capital to do so.

If you can get your transfer codes from them without having to give your password over the phone then start transferring now. You lose none of your registration period and you can find other registrars that don't suck. Even if you find a way to get what you want done with 1&1 you probably don't want to be doing business with a company that can't follow the most basic of security best practices.

Could someone provide some sort of a definition for the term "Simple Selling Market"? Is this essentially a competitor to Shopify?

"I love Erlang but I cannot get the past the syntax."

I also thought this. For some reason though the more I use it the more I am coming around to its syntax. There are lots of gotchas when compared with other popular languages, but still its syntax has grown on me recently.

At the opposite end of the syntactic spectrum is Lisp. The more I use Clojure the more I am loving it as well.

"The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory."

I agree. The future of server programming is also not spawning multiple child processes. The question I have is how far off is that future? I know that most of my web applications today simply run in multiple spawned OS processes.

http://stats.pingdom.com/qqps0x9eb0at/195711 indicates the outage on NS1 was 26 minutes. It's still a long time and we're pulling the trigger on some changes (read: capital investments) to stop it from happening in the future.

Not right now, we don't operate as a secondary provider (and I'm not sure we will).

Take a look at DynDNS's secondary service, that might work for you: http://dyn.com/dns/secondary-dns/

This might help: http://route53d.googlecode.com/svn-history/r2/trunk/README

Looks like they are close to getting NOTIFY and IXFR (incremental AXFR) working. It's an interesting approach none-the-less.

* We don't cap traffic at the moment but we do work with our customers when the traffic is significant, offering suggestions on how to improve DNS caching. If we ever do need to cap we'll make sure to give plenty of notice to any customer that would be affected.

* We don't have a timeline, but we have been working on it. We'd like to roll out support for secondary NOTIFY and AXFR, but perhaps we can find a short term solution without that.

Ideally your primary provider would support AXFR and NOTIFY which are part of the DNS zone transfer protocol. It's something we're working on adding to DNSimple, but we're not quite ready to launch it yet. The primary and secondary providers also both need to report the correct authoritative name server delegation details so the primary needs to ensure that that data is in the zone file.

There is another challenge in that we're pushing the envelope a bit by offering features that rely on more than just a DNS record (for example ALIAS and POOL records). These are useful features for some people, but if you're using these types of features then they won't be portable to secondary providers.

Yes, we had a short outage this morning. We're still investigating the root cause but the symptoms were essentially a simultaneous slow down across all name servers. It's quite possible this is part of the same DDoS that Zerigo is facing, we're not certain - we've been seeing lots of spikes today from various IP addresses (but we've actually been seeing similar patterns for quite some time, as have other DNS providers).

We'll post a more extensive post-mortem once we have a better understanding of what happened, but our main goal at the moment has been to ensure systems remain stable and responsive.

I tried to add some insight on another comment, but it's tough to say anything about DDoS that hasn't already been said. DDoS attacks suck, mitigating them requires a multi-prong approach and proactive monitoring and agressive banning and even then you can still be screwed if your bandwidth is saturated.

I feel for the operational folks at Zerigo - dealing with this type of outage is hard. The best thing they can do at this point is get back on Twitter and talk to their customers - the last post was 4 hours ago - that's a lifetime when your system is critical.

A dedicated DNS provider will often focus on the experience around managing DNS, including APIs and advanced features. Additionally some folks don't like putting all of their eggs in one basket and prefer to have their registrar be one company, their DNS be another and their hosts be another.

As you're probably aware the server that you use has little impact when the DDoS sends enough traffic to actually saturate your allocated bandwidth. Anycast provides a good way to handle DDoS, along with proactive monitoring and defense mechanisms, but at the end of the day DDoS are still extremely difficult to defend from completely. The downside is that Anycast is expensive and thus you need the capital to build it out and run it - which often raises the cost of systems built using it.