Business planning

Much time this week went into the business plan for Freistil-Consulting. When I tweeted about it, @jkleske promptly teased me: "business plan? haven't you read Rework yet? ;-)" What he meant was that, according to 37Signals' latest business book, "planning is guessing". And the numbers I use in the business plan actually are vague projections for the next three years. But first: I do have to present a business plan with a long term financial perspective to get state subsidies. And, more important: By replacing those guesses with the actual numbers, I'll get my first financial controlling instrument for the company. And boy, do I wish I had such a thing while running my previous businesses!

BTW, Johannes, I started reading "Rework" this morning. And I look forward to reading your very own weeknotes!

IT Infrastructure

I'm having fun playing with all those open source solutions that enable us to run an IT infrastructure business. There's Chef for automation, GlusterFS for data replication, JailKit for securing customer access, and so much more. I really enjoy learning to use (utilize, even!) those tools for the lean operation of our IT.

Already after some hours of Chef hacking, I'm able to have a Drupal server running in under 5 minutes, from launching the EC2 instance over installing the necessary packages and configuring user access to starting all the services. Thank you, Opscode!