Jon Brelig

Understanding the deficit in less than 30 seconds...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:01:00 -0500

Now anyone could understand this. Apparently Washington doesn’t…

United States Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Now, remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget.

Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710
Total budget cuts approved by Congress: $385

(credit: forwarded email, source unknown)

SkiReport.com acquired by Vail Resorts

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:01:00 -0400

It’s a been a while in the making, but can finally announce Vail Resorts has now officially acquired SkiReport.com (official press release).

Special thanks to my brother Nate and all the friends that have contributed in some fashion to SkiReport over the years… Jeff Collins, Matt Logan, Ben Standefer, Ashley Messick, Trevor Usken, Jonathan Hester, Rosanne O’Rourke, Marc Hemeon, and many more.

It’s been a long ride… pretty fun to to take a look at the Wayback machine to see the site change over the year. Too many milestones to name, but here’s a stab at some top ones:

May, 2003
My brother, Nate, and I acquire the domain, SkiReport.com.

November, 2003
Launched v1 of the site after two consecutive all nighters before catching flight to CO for thanksgiving. Pound a natty light with my roommate at 5am to celebrate and head to airport.

November, 2005
v2 launch… major upgrade to features/design

February, 2007
Launched subsidiary, SkiLodgingOnline.com. Umm, ya this one failed.

November, 2007
v3 launch, another big redesign

October, 2008
Launch iPhone app

January, 2010
Got some great press (NPR, AP, Globe&Mail) from our influx of mobile first hand reports and a Dartmouth Study statistically proving ski areas exaggerating snowfall.

November, 2010
Launch Android app

January, 2011
iPhone app hits 500k installs, Android app hit 250k installs

September, 2011
Acquired by Vail Resorts and Mountain News Corp

…

ahh and finally I’ll end the post with a really lame photo used for a blog post about SR years back.

Next Chapter...

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:38:00 -0400

It’s been three years, nearly to the date, when I left my job to venture into the start up world. It’s been an awesome journey since then… three companies, two acquisitions, many $5 Little Cesar pizza nights, hundreds of code releases, and probably thousands of cups of coffee.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the best and brightest in the business between FantasyBook (shoutout to Ben and Lammers), Citizen Sports (Steve, Mike, Ma, Rachael, Mead, Mark, many more), and most recently Yahoo! (JK, Linares, too many others to name).

Today is my last day at Yahoo! as I will be move back to launch a start up (more on that later). Thanks to all I’ve worked with… it’s been a blast.

Citizen Sports team with Mr Yang

Early days in the Daly City “office”

PHP to Python

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:40:18 -0400

I loved PHP. Take that back, I still love PHP. It still is my bread and butter, especially when I want to rock out a quick prototype. I’ve designed many many sites and based two companies (SkiReport.com & FantasyBook) on the php/mysql/apache stack.

With that said… PHP can also but a painstakingly frustrating. Here’s my short beef list with PHP….

No defacto framework:
CakePHP? Zend Studio? CogeIgnitor? Too many to choose from… and thus no one winner with complete docs and third-party support.

No threading
Ask Facebook their biggest challenge with PHP… no threading

Poor memory management
Effectively can’t create server side scripts

…

Switching to Python

So I dug in and made the switch to python. For all those stubborn php developers out there (i was one)… pull up your skirt and give it a shot. Here’s the stack I settled on below, suggest doing the same!

Python
Django
Virtualenv + PIP (isolated python environ, no version/dependency issues)
Apache/mod_wsgi
Fabric (streamline deployments & other tasks)
South (django app - db schema versioning)

My first tumble!We’ll see how long this lasts…

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:09:00 -0400

My first tumble!
We’ll see how long this lasts…