Johnny Boursiquot on building a software agency from scratch, learning Go for Rubyists, and server-less software architectures.

Hacker Practice: GROWTH, SYSTEMS, and RISK for Startups and SMB

Sometimes you start a conversation with one intention, and digress into something completely different.

This happened to me recently, in a conversation with an old friend and mentor, Johnny Boursiquot.

Johnny and I were supposed to do a deep dive into Go Lang and Ruby in this hour long conversation. Instead we spent half an hour talking about Johnny's experience building a technology agency from scratch.

Then we got around to talking tech XD.

Johnny is well-known as one of the pillars of BostonRB. He also helped to organize the Boston GoLang meetup before moving to Maryland where he founded Baltimore's GoLang Meetup.

He was listed on New Relic's list of 18 Go Experts to Follow Online.

In the episode we talk about:

• Johnny’s lessons learned from founding and building a tech agency, lots of juicy business advice for consulting companies and agencies in the first half of this talk
• The relative pros and cons of using ruby vs go in different domains

• How to get started using a new language

• A quick primer in serverless application architectures

• How intermediate devs can 10x their workflow

And a lot more

Enjoy

Notes

[00:00] What brings Johnny to Maryland after living more than a decade in Boston

• What brought him to Boston in the first place

[02:30] Major lessons learned from time in Boston running a technology company

• Running a company means that you’re responsible for other people’s income
• Many unexpected challenges: biz dev, legal, etc

[05:15] How did Johnny get started in technology business.

• Started with entrepreneurship in high school

[08:00] Learning how to do business

• Dealing with clients
• Managing expectation
• Touching on the difference between hacking and building a product

[11:00] #1 Lesson? The difference between a service business and product business

• Agencies do not scale the same way a product scales
• Most agencies do not end up producing a lot of reusable technology or internal products
• It’s hard to do internal product development because your staff is busy with revenue generating service activities
• It’s risky to invest in product development

[20:00] What would Johnny do differently if he could start over?

• Start a product company: raise money.

[23:00] What about the reverse situation? Making a profitable, successful agency.

• Protect your margins
• Be flexible with workflow; Agile doesn’t always work smoothly in an agency environment
• “They want warez”
• Your job is to tease out the specifics of what the client actually wants
• “You’re not in control of your own product roadmap”

[27:30] How to mitigate risk of scope creep

• Establish a relationship; a partnership to guarantee future work
• Get a Master Services Agreement

[32:00] Segue to technical discussion. What is Ruby good for vs Golang?

• Ruby for developing something fast. “Getting a web app out there as fast as possible”
• GoLang is better for heavy lifting, whenever performance is a consideration

[37:45] What are Johnny’s tips for learning Go (or any language)

• “Leave baggage at the door...appreciate the differences of Go”
• There is a “Go Way” of doing things

[41:15] What kind of project should I try using GO in

• Anything with heavy duty network requirements
• Microservices (“Something you can throw away”)
• “Gnarly, performance-critical jobs”
• Concurrency in Go is super-awesome

[45:00] AWS Lambda and Serverless 101

• Not actually “serverless”. That’s a marketing term. There is always a server somewhere.
• Monolithic App > Microservices > Lambda functions
• Everything is a discrete functional unit
• Very cost-effective because the server only runs when you call the function

[51:30] What can an intermediate Rails developer to 10-20x their workflow

• Look past the magic of the language (Ruby) or framework (Rails)
• Learn the underlying properties of the WYSIWYG
• Understand how SQL, HTTP, Databases, and CURL -- fundamentals of the web -- work
• Learning the underlying complexity enables you to use the higher-level abstractions more rapidly

[59:00] Johnny’s relationship with the command line

• Used to work in Windows, and mostly everything was a GUI
• Put together command-line tools to build Flash experiences
• Started using Ubuntu - understood that there are discrete tools to use and stitch together from the command line
• Now uses a Mac. Everything can be done from the terminal

[1:05:45] Running swift on the server

• Caffeine runs swift on the server to improve iOS network performance

[1:07:00] Johnny’s new life hack

• Modified Pomodoro with a physical twist

[1:10:00] Johnny’s child-rearing hacks

• Every child is different
• Reward effort over innate qualities
• Lots of people squander innate talent. Working hard never fails.

[1:14:00] Johnny’s new job at an education non-profit

• Serving under-served school districts
• Exposing diverse groups to the world of technology
• Bring education equity to the communities that need it most
• Mostly doing ops work these days
• The biggest challenge is always dealing with people
• Johnny loves pairing with more junior members

[1:20:00] Final requests to the audience and where to find Johnny

• @jboursiquot on Twitter
• Donate to the ACLU to protect the rights of individuals