Justin Foell

Disclaimer: this is not meant to offend any Mormons. My wife’s family is predominantly Mormon (though we are not). However, I’ve witnessed several of her cousins announce their engagements after only weeks of dating. And their wedding date was typically 3 months out from there.

I would never plan a 3 month-long engagement because I don’t think it’s enough time to plan a decent wedding and maintain your sanity. Weddings only happen once (if you do it right). Get it right the first time.

Like young, naive lovers, WordCamp organizers also need to suppress their hormones. We tend to get over-excited about WordPress – like evangelists that have been given a free podium. Pocket your emotions, and follow the advice from those who have come before you.

This post could serve both groups as a guide on how fools rush in. It’s possible to plan something this big in 3 months, but believe you-me, it is much less stress to take your time. I wish we had followed this advice – but we didn’t. In 3 months, despite the odds, we still managed to pull things off.

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Let’s do a WordCamp!

Since no one had organized a WordCamp in the Twin Cities since 2010, fellow MSPWP member Kiko Doran decided he would say “I do” – just to get the ball rolling. I decided to join him. My business partner, John Hawkins, has been organizing WordCamp Las Vegas since 2009. I figured he’d be a good resource to tap for questions. Besides, how hard can it be?!?

Kiko originally chose the date: 4/20. It came with an obvious Rastafarian theme, and he even had a logo put together before we locked in a venue:

WordCamp Rule #1

The first rule about WordCamp is that you don’t plan anything until you have a venue. Before Christmas in 2012, Kiko and I visited the downtown library and had the booking company save the date. Right before Christmas we were informed the space wasn’t available. The Friends of the Library get free reign of library rentals (as they should), and already had 4/20 wrapped up.

We quickly made an appointment with Minneapolis Community & Technical College, gracious host of the MSPWP un-conference event WordUP! They wouldn’t be able to meet until the first week of January. I wanted to keep our search momentum up, so we scheduled a visit to the University of St. Thomas (my alma-mater) around the same time.

St. Thomas’s downtown campus is great but all of the available large rooms were strangely spread out on different floors or in separate buildings. MCTC has a great space, and wanted to help sponsor the event. They weren’t available on 4/20 either, so our date had to be moved a week later to 4/27, which created scheduling challenges for my family in particular, but the show must go on!

Keep Calm and Carry On

After securing a venue things got crazy. We enlisted several people from MSPWP to help out. We let our organizing committee members run with whatever roles they felt they’d excel at. And excel they did! We had specialists for sponsors, venues, catering, and swag. Not to mention the normal kick-ass web development and design that comes with a group of WordPress geeks. I sincerely hope we can assemble a similar team next year.

We did a weekly conference call to make sure things were on track, and used Basecamp for all other communications during the week. I do believe the regular week-in week-out activity helped us keep our hormones in check.

The conference’s last day was 4/28 which was the due date of my wife’s pregnancy. Thankfully, she made it through the weekend labor-free.

Lessons Learned

If I learned anything, it would be to start planning a full year in advance. I think Kiko realized this as he started to talk to me about 2014 before the 2013 event had officially started. I like his enthusiasm but insisted that we first make it through our reboot of this conference before discussing the next year.

I hope we can continue to build long-lasting relationships so the whole community can benefit from a great event like WordCamp. One great partnership has been MCTC. They’re looking to add a WordPress course to their curriculum, and we hope that they can be a long time venue sponsor of WordCamp in the Twin Cities.

Also don’t expect that you, as an organizer, will get to enjoy the event. This same principle applies to a wedding. The best outcome you can have is that your guests enjoy themselves.

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This article’s concepts should be considered independent from the layout of your business: whether it’s a sole-proprietorship, partnership, LLC, etc. We’re only talking about how you file your taxes. This article is also geared towards freelancers, subcontractors, and small companies.

Schedule C

For most people getting started on their own, there is the “Schedule C.” You pay your 15.3% Medicare & Social Security, plus your income tax quarterly, and hope everything works out on tax day. This is a great way for anyone to feel the “pain” of how much you actually pay in taxes. It can hurt so much that you’ll wonder if there’s a better way, and there is. Enter the S-Corp.
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S-Corp

It stands for “Subchapter S Corporations” and is commonly referred to as a “Sub S” or “S-Corp.” I believe the “S” actually stands for “Shareholder.” It is also known as the “Newt Gingrich/John Edwards Loophole” as they helped bring it into law.

As an S-Corp, instead of filing one return, each shareholder files two: a normal W-2 and profit-share filing called a K-1. You take your total profits for the year and split it into two categories for each of these forms: Wages & Earnings (respectively). It’s up to you how to split this: 25/75, 35/65, 50/50 – and there-in lies the loophole.

You can opt to pay yourself less than “reasonable compensation” for your W-2 and save more. The IRS knows this, so as soon as you send in the S-Corp election paperwork, they’ll send you an ominous letter like this:

However, it’s not all doom-and-gloom. A good starting point to split wages & earnings is 50/50 and you still stand to save some money.

A Simple Comparison

This is an oversimplified example using a Minnesotan making $50,000 a year paying taxes at a 25% federal income tax rate and a 7.05% Minnesota income tax rate.

Schedule C

Income: $50,000
Less Social Sec. / Medicare ($7650 @ 15.3%): $42,350
Less Fed. Income Tax ($10,587 @ 25%): $31763
Less MN Income Tax ($2,239 @ 7.05%): $29,254

S-Corp

Income: $50,0000

Earnings (K-1): $25,000
Less Fed. Income Tax ($6,250 @ 25%): $18,750
Less MN Income Tax ($1,321 @ 7.05%): $17,429

Wages (W-2): $25,000
Less Social Sec. / Medicare ($3,825 @ 15.3%): $21,175
Less Unemployment Tax ($105 @ 0.5%): $21,070
Less Fed. Income Tax ($5,267 @ 25%): $15,803
Less MN Income Tax ($1,114 @ 7.05%): $14,869

That leaves you with $32k rather than $29k. With tax preparation costs somewhere between $300-$700, it’s still worth it. My tax preparer, Randy Valtinson at Central Tax Service, charges $400 to do my S-Corp filing. He’s a S-Corp evangelist if I’ve ever met one. I’m glad there are tax nerds like him out there fighting the good fight for us.

Timing it Right

Another word of advice. If you’re currently filing a Schedule C – time the switch to an S-Corp wisely. I did mine in the middle of the year – not smart. I continued to pay my quarterly taxes at my Schedule C rate and added unemployment tax payments on top of that. It was a tough year that made me doubt that the S-Corp election was worth it. I didn’t feel any relief until a full tax year later.

Learn from my mistake. Your Schedule C should cease on December 31st and your S-Corp should start on January 1st. It will make life much easier for you, your tax preparer, and your wallet.

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I have the privilege of living walking distance from a bus route that has served me well for most of my time spent in the Twin Cities: The 10. When I was a kid growing up in Northeast Minneapolis, my dad would take me to Twins games downtown on the 10. Now in Fridley, I can still take it to any number of businesses along Central Ave. I can also head downtown and make any number of connections. The 10 runs late into the night, so I can even take it home after a long night of imbibing.

However, my closest bus stop (Central Ave. & Gardena Ave. by Moore Lake Beach) is a pedestrian SNAFU, no thanks in part to Fridley’s city planners.

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You’d think that with an elementary school & high school just 2 blocks to the east of this intersection, the city would have provided a safe walking path down to the beach at Moore Lake Park – not the case.

If you are walking down Gardena Ave. (westbound), you must walk in the turn lane before getting to the crosswalk. Not exactly fun if you have a baby in a stroller or if you value your own life.

There is an additional problem for 10N passengers if they wish to disembark at this intersection. The northbound 10N’s stop is actually just before Gardena Ave. (map marker “A”). This is actually in a turn lane on Central Ave. for cars going eastbound on Gardena Ave. Pedestrians also wishing to go eastbound on Gardena Ave. can either walk in the yards (no sidewalk is provided) or walk in the turn lane. In the winter, walking in the turn lane is really the only option. Good luck when it’s dark out, it will be like a real-life game of Frogger.

I’m not asking the city to add sidewalks – I don’t think that battle can be won at this time. I’m just asking for pedestrians and cyclist to be given some respect. This intersection has far too much automotive treatment.

Replace right turn lanes with normal shoulder treatment

Removing the right turns lanes would solve a lot. Just leave the shoulders painted normally all the way up to the intersection so that cars turning right understand that this is “shared space” and that they are not the priority. A good example of this would be the intersection just to the north at Central Ave. & Hillcrest Dr.:

central-and-hillcrest — It’s paint, not rocket surgery

I would remove the right turn lane on Old Central Ave. to Gardena Ave. All you need to do is “erase” the turnout line on the road to reconnect it as a normal shoulder line, and then remove the right turn signs. Residents can put their garbage cans in the street on trash day and pedestrians and cyclists can use the space without fear that they’ll be hit from behind. A side benefit will be that speeding cars will be self-regulated by cars slowing to turn right.

On Gardena Ave. I would also remove the explicit right turn lane and restore normal shoulder painting. Remove the “Straight & Left” arrow from the lane as well and let drivers figure out where they should be going – keeping drivers on their toes will make them more cautious, creating a safer environment for everyone.

Install & Configure PulseAudio

I found there are a few “tricks” to getting Pulse to work the way I wanted. Some of it involved going against conventional wisdom and running Pulse in “system” mode. To me this isn’t an issue at all as the Raspberry Pi sits on my desk to provide audio service to anyone that’s legitimately connected to my network.

Start by installing PulseAudio and its Zeroconf module:

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

Set Pulse to run as a system daemon:

sudo vi /etc/default/pulseaudio

[...]
PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1
[...]
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=0

At this point you can turn on the PulseAudio system service:

sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

You can test the sound by running:

paplay /usr/share/scratch/Media/Sounds/Vocals/Singer1.wav

However, I was getting strange errors like

pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

even though Pulse was up-and-running. I think Pulse on my Raspberry Pi was getting confused because my desktop system also runs PulseAudio as well and some connection info was transferred in my SSH session. To convince Raspberry Pi’s Pulse to play locally, I set the PULSE_SERVER environment variable:

sudo vi /etc/environment

PULSE_SERVER=localhost

Uncomment the following lines and change the resample method and resampling rate. The sample rate was needed to allow playback from my Ubuntu laptop, the resample method was needed to allow playback from iPhone.

sudo vi /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

[...]
resample-method = trivial
[...]
default-sample-rate = 48000

Comment out the suspend-on-idle module to prevent all the clicks & pops. Turn on anonymous network access and publish the configuration using zeroconf. Change “192.168.0.0” if your network uses a different numbering scheme.

If we were running PulseAudio in user mode, these next changes would be the equivalent of running paprefs visiting the Network tab and checking:

Enable network access to local sound devices
- Allow other machines on the LAN to discover local sound devices
- Don’t require authentication

sudo vi /etc/pulse/system.pa

[...]
#load-module module-suspend-on-idle
[...]
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.0.0/24 auth-anonymous=1
load-module module-zeroconf-publish

Move your /etc/asound.conf to /etc/asound.old:
sudo mv /etc/asound.conf /etc/asound.old
Then create a new one with PulseAudio as the default:
sudo vi /etc/asound.conf

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

Tell libao (shairport’s sound library) to use Pulse instead of ALSA directly:
sudo vi /etc/libao.conf

default_driver=pulse
quiet

Install & Configure shairport

This is basically a re-hashing of several other useful installs I found. I felt the need to include it here for completeness.

Start by installing the necessary Git & Perl build packages:

sudo apt-get install git libao-dev libssl-dev libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libio-socket-inet6-perl libwww-perl avahi-utils libmodule-build-perl

Unlike other shairport write-ups, I installed the Perl module ‘Net::SDP’ (needed for iOS6 support) via CPAN instead of Git. Adding this library supposedly enables shairport to work with iOS6 devices, but my wife’s phone (which is iOS6) doesn’t work, however my iOS5 phone does. Anyway, it doesn’t hurt to install it:

sudo cpan install Net::SDP

Then clone, and build shairport from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/albertz/shairport.git shairport
cd shairport
make
sudo make install
sudo cp shairport.init.sample /etc/init.d/shairport
sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/shairport
sudo update-rc.d shairport defaults

I went an extra step and made the shairport service run as the pulse user, and to write the process ID file to the pulse-owned /var/run/pulse directory:

sudo vi /etc/init.d/shairport

[...]
NAME=AirPi
USER=pulse
DAEMON="/usr/local/bin/shairport.pl"
PIDFILE=/var/run/pulse/$NAME.pid
DAEMON_ARGS="-w $PIDFILE -a $NAME"

[ -x $binary ] || exit 0

RETVAL=0

start() {
    echo -n "Starting shairport: "
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile "$PIDFILE" \
                          --chuid $USER \
                          --exec "$DAEMON" -b --oknodo -- $DAEMON_ARGS
        log_end_msg $?
}
[...]

You can now start shairport like any other service:

sudo /etc/init.d/shairport start

Did I mention you should do some testing after each of these steps? I forgot to mention it, but you probably should just to make sure everything is heading in the right direction. If I’ve forgotten anything, let me know and I’ll post an update.

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tl;dr? Like the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared

The Nerdery’s Overnight Website Challenge is coming up again. I will be participating for my 5th year. I’ve had some good years and some bad. I’ve used software that I love and software that I’ve hated. I’ve been on teams that were finalists, one that won the event, and others that weren’t close to the podium but had a great time.

By now, I think most of the webchallenge web pros are seasoned veterans, but none-the-less I’d like to share some of my pro tips – if only for self-documentation. You should first take care of yourself before, during, and after the event. But when it comes to your team, the short story is: Be Prepared. The long story? Do as much as you can ahead of time, not the day of the event.

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Goals

This is sort of an esoteric concept, but very important none-the-less. Your non-profit is going to come to the event with some goals in mind. Your team should have some goals in mind as well, and with any luck, the overlap will be pretty good.

Some team goals:

If there are programming customizations outside the realm of “out-of-the-box” solutions, limit large custom programming undertakings to just one (1). You’re better off having one killer feature or integration point than two that partially function. Custom programming stuff is inevitable because your non-profit probably uses some CRM (Client Relationship Manager) that no one has ever heard of. Be aware that if you send two members of your team down a rabbit hole on a task like this, you may not see them until the next morning. Don’t count on this task being done. In fact you may want to mitigate the feature set so that it works “good enough” for the presentation / demonstration. Know what will cause the feature to “blow up” – and don’t do those things during your demo!

Launch a new site at the end of 24hrs. This seems obvious, but it really requires restraint on both the web team and non-profit’s behalf. Too often, one or both sides gets caught up in certain feature or aspect of the site that prevents the site from launching at the end of the contest. Be willing to accept that the site may not be 100% feature or content complete, and instead relish the fact that the baseline product now looks and acts as a solid foundation for the future.

Hardware

Server

This is the base of everything everyone on your team will be working with. Whether it is a hosted server in a data center, or a laptop that you bring to the challenge, have it set up for everyone on your team.

I would like to warn teams in advance not to count on whatever in-kind hosting has been donated to the event. In the past, this is VISI. VISI used to be the bee’s knees back in 1999 when they had the best DSL service in town. VISI had been bought and sold so many times since then, I’m not sure what was left from the original. Needless to say, their hosting left something to be desired. I don’t know how well ipHouse will be meeting the need. But don’t be surprised if your donated virtual private server is CentOS5 with 256mb of RAM and PHP 5.1.6 installed with no clear upgrade path. It may be no better for Ruby, Python, and .NET environments.

Your non-profit may have a host that they already like and is usable. However you can’t count on that so you should always have a Plan B (or Plan C). If someone on your team has a host where they can easily create a new web-root for development and testing, you should have it prepared and at the ready.

OpenWrt + Dnsmasq

This has been sort of a “secret sauce” for our team. Our server is on a laptop local to our team. We use an OpenWrt router with Dnsmasq that everyone on the team connects to. No one has to create host entries to connect to the laptop/server and it’s consistent for everyone. At the end of the competition, we simply give our presentation from our laptop/server since we can take it anywhere.

Software

Are you using a CMS? My team uses WordPress, so we like to come prepared with every plugin and theme pre-installed that we’d normally recommend for any client. Deleting unused extras at the end only takes about 5 minutes.

Version Control

Some people still feel that using version control is going to slow their team down. You’re doing it wrong – which probably means you’re doing it wrong at your day job. Do everyone a favor and learn the concepts of version control and have your team all agree to which you’ll use. Subversion or Git are both fine choices. We will be using Git as GitHub – they’ve been an event sponsor in the past (plus Git is pretty rad).

For those who you may have to drag kicking-and-screaming into the world of version control, you can set up a network share on your server where all changes are automatically committed. This may take up more setup time than it’s worth, so I instead recommend teaching your team to fish with whatever tool(s) everyone agreed upon.

Great kid, don’t get cocky!

harrison-ford-han-solo-slice

There’s one last thing I want to address is about winning. I’ve done it. I did it on a team where I didn’t like our technical leader nor the software he had chosen for the team (thanks for asking!). This would make any developer unhappy. In short, it was not fun.

This blog post from the 2011 contest has some good tips from a winning team (and some bad), you’ll have to view the cached version here: Andy Blogs It – look for How we won the Overnight Website Challenge -or- How you can win next year. Much of the last 1/3rd should be ignored in regards to technology choices and especially in regards to technology opinions. Go ahead, read it. I’ll wait. Being of infinite wisdom, Andy’s blog was on Posterous and is no longer available. I’ll give you the cliffs notes: he gives a bunch of good tips at the beginning and then proceeds to diss PHP and WordPress amongst other things.

Would I go and publicly insult team Ruby.MN because Ruby is for hippies? No way. Am I going to try and convince the Drupal team that WordPress is better because it has bigger market share? Absolutely not. We all do what we do because it’s what we like and what we know. Similarly, if you find yourself on a team where you don’t like what you’re doing – jump ship! The Overnight Website Challenge will only bring you satisfaction if you enjoy what you’re doing.

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Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

WordCamp Minneapolis – My Mormon Wedding

Let’s do a WordCamp!

WordCamp Rule #1

Keep Calm and Carry On

Lessons Learned

The S in S-Corp is for Save

Schedule C

S-Corp

A Simple Comparison

Schedule C

S-Corp

Timing it Right

Fridley Hates Pedestrians (Part 2) – Moore Lake Beach

Replace right turn lanes with normal shoulder treatment

Raspberry Pulse: Raspberry Pi + PulseAudio + Shairport

Install & Configure PulseAudio

Install & Configure shairport

Overnight Website Challenge: Be Prepared

tl;dr? Like the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared

Goals

Hardware

Server

OpenWrt + Dnsmasq

Software

Version Control

Great kid, don’t get cocky!