I started at Increo last Monday the 3^rd. I’ve taken over the resident newbie position from Henry and have had many questions over the past week. The thing that has struck me the most in this short time is the ability to make decisions and move quickly.

Prior to joining Increo I was working at a large company with an established product. One of the things about having an established product is that you also have established processes and everyone has their established ways of doing things. People would say that you were ‘ahead of the curve’ if you could get to the point where you could check out the code and build it before the end of the first week. These processes and tools come in handy when you want to maintain the quality of a large codebase or facilitate interactions with other teams, however, they also can slow the development process with their overhead.

Increo, being a small company, avoids most of the overhead that one experiences in a large company. It also has the important side effect of allowing new people to come up to speed quickly since there are not a countless number of ‘standard’ tools to learn. I was able to check in more code for Backboard in my first week here at Increo than I was in the first month at my previous employer.

Please don’t mistake this as a blanket bashing of having established processes and tools since it is important to standardize the way design decisions and code changes get made to keep large projects running smoothly. I’m just saying that upon joining Increo, I was struck by the ability to move quickly by not using a strict process. Being small provides the ability to be flexible, adapt and get stuff done.

We know you’ll all be woefully disappointed to hear this, but the simple truth is that Increo does not have HermanMiller Embody chairs for its employees.

Then again, we’re also not the types to spend fourteen hours straight sitting down; there’s enough action in the office that we’ll be moving around enough to stay healthy.

In fact, while having the world’s most comfortable chair would certainly be enjoyable, we took a different tack: what was the best, most ergonomic setup we could create for six employees for less than the cost of one Embody chair?

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This weekend I sat down and tackled the RAM problem: the amount of memory it takes the server to generate a single page of a website.

For Backboard, we have our server set up to allocate just 16 MB of RAM to PHP for the execution of each request. This allows us maximize the number of Apache processes we can run on a single server and thus maximize the number of users we support. To do this, though, means that the site has to be pretty light on its memory requirements.

Backboard, as a CakePHP application, has a theoretical minimum requirement for RAM: namely, the amount needed to execute a base installation of Cake. In our testing, this falls between 4 and 6 MB. The goal, of course, is to minimize anything above and beyond this.

Here are some concrete steps you can take to limit the RAM needs of your site:

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As you’re perusing Increo on Ideas, you might notice references to the OIT (Official Increo Tablecloth), our recent order of OIFs (Official Increo Fleeces) or a mention of the OIVP (Official Increo Vacation Policy).  Walking through the office you’ll see the OIPS, the OIS, and the OIP (Official Increo Paper Shredder, Official Increo Scissors, and Official Increo Projector, respectively).

Adding OI to everything is fun, silly and pokes at the dynamism of a startup.  If being “Official” is nothing more than dubbing it so, we have tremendous flexibility in the way we do things.  Adopting new tools, frameworks and processes, latching onto those that work, and discarding those that don’t has allowed us to find the optimal arrangement.

With that, I’ll pop the tab on an OISD (Official Increo Soft Drink) and return to the OITDL (Official Increo To-Do List).

Last Tuesday, Increo was excited to be able to take part in the ROCKSTAR Startup Fair hosted by DLA Piper and Social Walla. A fun experience, to be sure, and useful to boot, but we took away some very intriguing insights.

Our “booth” was a desk in a small room; there were perhaps a dozen other companies with other desks, all ringing the perimeter of the room.

Lesson #1

Covering your table makes you look good.

When you have no idea what kind of situation you’ll be in, this is a variable you can control. Distracting wood grain? Cheap plastic? No place to stow your stuff? A cheap table cover takes care of all of those problems. The Official Increo Tablecloth isn’t even expensive; it’s just a couple yards of inexpensive suit fabric.

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The scene: it’s 8 am on a Thursday morning in a second-floor conference room in a building that’s barely been finished. China Basin, San Francisco, across the street from the ballpark. You, surprisingly awake yet bleary-eyed at the same time, are really just longing for that cup of Philz Coffee you didn’t have time to stop for on the way in. Two venture capitalists have acceded to showing up to talk to a bunch of starry-eyed entrepreneurs in the midst of the meltdown on Wall Street, perhaps to calm some nerves.

Twenty or so people fill the room. You go around the room to do introductions and see the contrasts among the assembled group. Some are doing hardware, some software. Some have funding already, some don’t. Those who don’t appear to be a bit more desperate than the others, surprise surprise.

Some have come from a couple blocks away in the startup hotbed known as South Park. Some have come from the South Bay, like yourself. Some have come from as far away as the other side of the country or around the world. Everybody has one thing in common, though: they love creating amazing new technology.

The message is clear: yes, investors are skittish about putting money in to companies right now, but no, they haven’t run out of funds to invest. The mood is, as our heroes on Wall Street might say, “cautiously optimistic”. Now is the time to innovate! Stop wasting capital and get with the amazingness!

The hour goes on, filled with more venture capital jargon than you can shake a stick at, and you can tell that maybe half the room has glazed over. The sense you get is that what really matters is having an incredible concept and an incredible team to bring that concept to fruition.

This is, of course, what we love for here in Silicon Valley: the chance to meet people who have really great ideas in their heads. People who have a chance to act on their ideas in a place where they can really effect something great. And honestly, nobody in the room is entirely worried, because great ideas live on, regardless of the current funding climate.

Eventually, you walk out of the room an hour and a half later, feeling inspired by the amount of excitement all around you, having made a few connections, ready for that cup of coffee a block over at Philz followed by the short one-hour trip back down to Mountain View.

Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to provide an occasional window into the more technical side of Increo’s products and share some of the more interesting challenges we’ve faced and problems we’ve solved with the greater web developer community.

The topic this week is Flash 10, but please let us know if there is another technical aspect of Backboard that intrigues you and you want to know more about!

Now, to the story:

Starting a few weeks ago, we began hearing some intermittent reports from users that they could no longer create a Backboard by uploading a file. They said they kept clicking the “Select File” button and nothing happened. 

We were understandably disturbed, as the ability to create Backboards is rather critical to the site… but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We were busily working on brand new Backboard functionality, and the reports were infrequent enough that we chalked it up to a potential incompatibility with another browser plugin. Or maybe they just had Flashblock installed and didn’t realize it? Yep, that had to be the problem.

Flash matters because we use the excellent open-source SWFUpload package to handle document uploads on Backboard. This allows us to not only customize the appearance of the upload buttons themselves, but also display informative progress bars as the file is transferred. Being a tight-knit combination of Flash and JavaScript, SWFUpload takes a bit of work to configure and integrate, but the results are well worth it.

A week ago, we located a computer that exhibited the problem, and it was immediately clear that it was an issue we could no longer ignore: the other Flash that we use on the site worked fine, but the Select File button did nothing when clicked.

After a quick check on the SWFUpload forums for news of recent incompatibilities, the cause was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, the solution was anything but…

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