Entrepreneur Journal: Kory Gill, Co-Founder, Newline Software
(Reuters) - What would happen if your laptop was lost, stolen or accidentally dropped in a pool? Would you be able to easily retrieve all the megabytes of precious content housed in its memory banks? These are the questions that drove Seattle software developer Kory Gill to leave an almost 20-year career at Microsoft and start his own online data-storage company, Newline Software. The following is a personal 5-day journal written by Kory Gill exclusively for Reuters.com on his work and life:
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Day 1 - Tuesday, May 19
Every day Marius, the other co-founder of Newline Software, and myself get closer to releasing our beta and realizing the vision we had back in July 2008 of creating a new software company from the ground up, built upon principles like transparency, trust, and fair pricing for all products and services.
We meet each morning and review the previous day's events and agree on a general plan for the day. Yesterday I had worked on the code to test our billing system so we can integrate with the payment gateway that will process our credit card transactions. Marius discussed his new code for our client/server authentication and authorization subsystem. It allows users to log in to our website and allows our Newline Exact™ product to communicate with our cloud services securely. Marius also did some additional work on our security library to add extra entropy to our "security ticket" system to ensure our encrypted client/server sessions remain difficult (if not impossible) to hack.
Marius saw an article yesterday about a new feature from Microsoft in an upcoming version of Windows Communication Framework (WCF 4.0) that deals with simplifying "config" settings, basically a file programs use to describe how to make connections between client and server computers. While much better than what exists today, we both chuckled a bit when our own in-house solution was still better. Once we release our product, we plan on sharing a lot of our code and learning experiences like this on our blog to give back to the development community.
I also wrote more code to test the performance of the PayTrace payment gateway (credit card processing) we are evaluating from Total Merchant Concepts. I found 3 minor issues while using the PayTrace API (application programing interface), and their support team said they would fix the issues tonight, and I could test them tomorrow. Now that's great service! With an understanding of how our code needs to interact with the credit-card processor, I began work on the C# classes for our billing system. Marius made additional improvements to our authentication system, and reduced the header size by about 75 percent from our initial design. Since the header is included in every request between our client and server components, this is a significant cost savings in terms of bandwidth and performance. Marius also refactored some code and switched to an all-binary encoding for our client to cloud communication.
Some people I worked with at Microsoft, who also left to start their own company, announced their new product today. Bryan, Steve and Jeremy from Glympse.com created a really cool product that uses the GPS on your phone to allow you to provide people with a "Glympse" of where you are at, and integrated it with Google maps. Congratulations Bryan, Steve, and Jeremy!
Day 2 - Wednesday, May 20
Today, four servers destined for our production data center at Fisher Plaza in Seattle arrived. Consistent with our views on being "green", these servers are built with components that minimize power consumption, especially when not at full load, without sacrificing the performance we expect. The server enclosure is a new model form SuperMicro's "Twin" product line. Where a typical server might take up 1U, or 1 row in a server rack, this enclosure fits 4 servers into 2U, or just 2 rows in a server rack. As expected, the fans run at a low speed, and power consumption as measured by our "Kill-A-Watt" device was about 125 watts per server under load. To configure these servers we run an automated deployment system we created in- house. It will take a bare metal system and install a fully configured server in about 35 minutes. We do this by using a single Windows Server 2008 "reference image" that is on our Windows Deployment Services (WDS) server, booting from the network and running a custom Windows PE image that launches a custom application where an administrator can select the type of machine to build. One machine that I did took 35 minutes to come up as a web server, joined to our domain, joined to our web cluster (server farm), and was serving web pages, all with no further user intervention. We wanted to avoid costly and lengthy data center server installations, so we designed all of our server installations to work this way, which will save Newline Software a lot of money now, and in the future.
Day 3 - Thursday, May 21
Another server arrived today. This is probably one of our most efficient, expensive, and critical servers since it will host our production SQL database. Mark Smith from Hard Drives Northwest delivered the new server personally. Thanks Mark! Mark is fantastic to work with, really knows his business, and always gets us great pricing. Marius and I enjoy great engineering and bleeding-edge technology, especially when it can help us be "green." This machine has the latest processors, fastest RAM, and the fastest SSD (solid state) hard drives on the market today. We, of course, used our WDS automation to deploy Windows Server 2008 on the machine, and install SQL Server. The best part about this new server is that it aligns with our Eco- Digital Preservation initiative. Primarily because the 24 SSD drives have no moving parts, the machine rarely uses 200 watts of power when under a full load! The fans don't even spin up most of the time, and this is an enterprise-class server machine destined for our data center. Eco-Digital Preservation indeed!
We blew it! While testing the performance of our new SQL server, we had all our server boxes in our office for our initial configuration. Well, it turns out then when every machine was on, and fully utilized, we used just enough power to blow the 20-amp circuit breaker for our office. Luckily, we have UPS backup battery protection on all our office machines, so only the new servers lost power. Melissa from Thinkspace (the building we rent our office pace out of) quickly responded to our minor emergency and restored our power. Needless to say, our servers are moving to our server room - where they belong - tomorrow. We were just so excited to see them running we didn't put them in the server room right away...lesson learned. Peter Chee, Thinkspace founder, looked into the problem and it turns out that our office had only one circuit for all the outlets, so he scheduled an electrician to come out next week and put our office on two circuits which is more appropriate given its size. Thanks Peter!
Day 4 - Wednesday, May 27
This journal entry is a little late due to the Memorial Day holiday and catching up a bit on Tuesday. I spent the long weekend camping near Mt. Rainier at the Mounthaven Resort. My son, Jace (8), and I joined the Herrboldt family, and we had adjoining spots for our RV's; well, I have a truck camper and Scott and April Herrboldt have a 32-foot 5th wheel. We had a ton of fun, went to Mt. Rainier each day to hike, sightsee, and enjoy the outdoors. My wife, Janet, and daughter, Kyla, spent the weekend getting Kyla, who just got out of college for the summer, ready for her trip to South Dakota next week.
Marius and his wife Miruna, who have 3 children under 5 years of age, stayed closer to home and spent time at tending their garden, catching up on some spring cleaning, and went to a few local parks to enjoy the good Seattle weather, an anomaly for Memorial Day for sure.
Back at work, and refreshed from a few days off, we resumed our work on creating the environment for our production data center. We currently have it staged in our server room at our office to make it easy to get everything setup properly. Once that is done, we will move all the equipment to our data center, change a couple IP addresses, and our servers will be "live." We are another step closer to releasing our beta. Marius finalized the code to store credentials securely on client computers. We evaluated how a few products on the market were doing this across several different segments, and decided on a method that was the best of all of them. Data privacy is an important foundation of our product and company, so we wanted to ensure our solution is best in class. Over the weekend, Marius was looking at how we have our office machines configured, and we decided to add additional hard drives to our development machines for data mirroring to minimize any downtime should one of our hard drives fail. We are so close to feature complete, we don't want any hardware failures to impact us. We can always restore from our backups, but that is not as quick as replacing a hard drive from a raid array.
Day 5 - Thursday, May 28
We arrived in the office this morning and found that a hard drive had failed on one of our corporate data servers. This machine runs our team foundation server, SharePoint, and test SQL databases. The machine is configured with raid 6, so we can lose up to two drives before any data is lost and we'd need to restore from backup. So we swapped out the bad drive with one from our inventory, and were back up and running normally in no time.
We got a call from a VC firm today. It was a pure cold call, but we are always open to new opportunities, and a partnership could be appropriate in the future. We agreed to a meeting in mid June.
Marius refactored and moved an in-house utility for database deployments for the product to our shared code library. This allows our internal setup engine to be used across multiple projects. This was one of the first infrastructure projects we created, and has benefited us well since its inception. We believe great software requires great tools to develop, deploy, and sustain it.
This just about wraps us our journal we did in conjunction with our upcoming interview with Reuters. We are looking forward to the interview and telling everyone what we can about our product plans. We are saving a lot of what we're working on for our official launch, but once we go live with our beta sign up page, we will start releasing more information. We have a lot of original thinking, design, features planned and built into our Newline Exact™ Eco-Digital Preservation product. We believe individuals and businesses will quickly appreciate what our product offers. Our company is unique in many ways, and this is reflected in how we design our product.
