Second Bit

It has been a little while since we last announced a new product or project. I was really excited to release gets by this weekend, and the response has been overwhelming and wonderful.

Mental illness and the tech community are things that have been on my mind for almost a full year now, and it’s good to finally be doing something about it, even if it’s not much.

It's a very sad day at Second Bit HQ. Actually, it's a very sad month at Second Bit HQ, we just haven't gotten around to properly mourning until now. Today, we say goodbye to two of our team members.

Two years ago today, New York State said "Paddy and Tino want to start a company? What could possibly go wrong?" and granted our little company status as a limited liability corporation in the state of New York.

After we introduced Pastry to the world and got a lot of feedback on it (as well as some awesome contributions from the Go community), we started thinking about the directions we’d like to take the project. We realised a lot of these directions strayed from the original Pastry paper in their approach to the problem, even if the goals were the same.

To avoid misleading developers that stumble across this package without being aware of the subtle distinctions, we’re renaming the project to Wendy as of today.

Update (11/27/12): After some discussion, we’ve renamed the project from its original and ambiguous “Pastry” to “Wendy”. This gives us a little more freedom to stray from the algorithm where appropriate and build things the way we’d like to without being misleading. The post below has been updated to reflect this change, but you’re welcome to view the post in its original form on Github. Please see the blog post for more information.

We’re really pleased to be open sourcing something we’ve been working on for a long time now: Wendy, an implementation of the Pastry distributed hash table written entirely in Go. We’re only comfortable calling it an “alpha release” right now, so you may not want to run any mission-critical software on it just yet, but it’s ready to be kicked around a bit.

Today is a very exciting day here at Second Bit. We are very pleased to welcome Dylan Staley to our team on a temporary basis. Dylan will be taking charge of our user experience and user interface, and we couldn’t be more excited.

By now, many of you have seen the internet-wide protest of SOPA & PIPA, two bills that threaten the security, stability, and freedom of the internet. The bills seek to stop online piracy by granting unprecedented powers to the US government, powers that would, according to many experts, make the internet as we know it cease to function.

Today is a very special day for us here at Second Bit. Today marks a year since our little company officially came into being. A year of hard lessons, hard work, and a whole lot of growth: for us, as people, and for Second Bit, as a company. Just over a year ago, Tino approached me and said "Hey, I see you are setting money on fire. Want to start a company and set more money on fire?" I promptly thought about it for a few seconds and said “I would like to not lose my house if someone decided to sue, yes.” And from these glorious roots, we formed a company.

We’ve had a lot of trouble over the last year trying to monetise 2cloud. Tino and I are not happy with the app’s monetisation to date, so we met to discuss why things aren’t working and how to fix that. We came up with a very simple problem we were failing to address.

There are two types of software you buy and each has an equivalent in the real world. Apps are a bit like products, things you pick up off the shelf and buy. Services are a bit like… well, services. They’re products constrained by time. Think of a movie at the cinema: you buy that, but for two hours at a time. Think of your internet connection: you buy that for a month at a time.

We believe 2cloud is a service, because that’s the only way we can keep it running. We incur recurring costs to keep the service online, so we need recurring income or we’ll run out of money. When we run out of money, servers crash. It gets ugly. We don’t want that, and we hope you don’t either.

I was having one of our many hours-long phone conversations with Tino recently, and we got talking about something I think is very important to any tech company: failure.

"I don't want your learning to be me, flying around whacking at you with a sword, saying 'She was leaving you, Pan!', and then smacking you down like the hand of God until you smash your head against the deck of a ship twenty feet below."

Any of you who have a soul will recognise this as the climactic battle in the 2003 version of Peter Pan, but that’s really irrelevant. I just get a small payout every time I write about that movie, so I mention it wherever possible. (Not really—I just love the movie.) Really, the point is that Peter couldn’t better himself (or turn pink, for that matter) until he got smacked around a bit.

It has taken me far too long to get this set up, but I’m actually pretty pleased with how it turned out. That’s right, a full five months after our website went live, we are now gracing it with a blog.

This blog is going to largely just be about company news, ideas, lessons, and directions. We haven’t needed a blog for this so far, because our only real project was 2cloud, and that has its own blog. But it looks like we may start pursuing other projects in the near future, and it seems silly to have a blog for each of our projects. Maybe in the future, each project will get a blog; for now, we’re going to let 2cloud be the exception, not the rule.