Runa.com, the startup where I am CTO, is looking for great developers to join our small agile team. We’re an early stage, pre-series-A startup (presently funded with strategic investments from two large corporations). Runa offers a SaaS to on-line merchant that allows them to offer dynamic product and consumer specific promotions embeded in their website. This will be a very large positive disruption to the online retailing world.

Techie keywords: clojure, hadoop, hbase, rabbitmq, erlang, chef, swarm computing, ruby, rails, javascript, amazon EC2, emacs, Macintosh, Linux, selenium, test/behavior driven development, agile, lean, XP, scalability

If you’re interested, email  jobs@runa.com

If you want to know more, read on!

What do we do

Runa aims to provide the top of the long tail thru the middle of the top 500 online retailers with tools/services that companies like amazon.com use/provide. These smaller guys can’t afford or don’t have the resources to do anything on that scale, but by using our SaaS services, they can make more money while providing customers with greater value.

The first service we’re building is what we call Dynamic Sale Price.

It’s a simple concept – it allows the online-retailer to offer a sale price for each product on his site, personalized to the individual consumer who is browsing it. By using this service, merchants are able to –

• Increase conversion (get them to buy!) and
• Offer consumers a special price which maximizes the merchant’s profit

This is different from “dumb-discounting” where something is marked-down, and everyone sees the same price. This service is more like airline or hotel pricing which varies from day to day, but much more dynamic and real-time. Further, it is based on broad statistical factors AND individual consumer behavior. After all, if you lower prices enough, consumers will buy. Instead, we dynamically lower prices to a point where statistically, that consumer is most likely to buy.

How we do it

Runa does this by performing statistical analysis and pattern recognition of what consumers are doing on the merchant sites. This includes browsing products on various pages, adding and removing items from carts, and purchasing or abandoning the carts. We track consumers as they browse, and collect vast quantities of this click-stream data. By mining this data and applying algorithms to determine a price point per consumer based on their behavior, we’re able to  maximize both conversion (getting the consumer to buy) AND merchant profit.

We also offer the merchant comprehensive reports based on analysis of the mountains of data we collect. Since the data tracks consumer activity down to the individual product SKU level (for each individual consumer), we can provide very rich analytics.  This is a tool that merchants need today, but don’t have the resources to build for themselves.

The business model

For reference, it is useful to understand the affiliate marketing space. Small-to-medium merchants (our target audience) pay affiliates up to 40% of a sale price. Yes, 40%. The average is in the 20% range.

We charge our merchants around 10% of sales the Runa delivers. Our merchants are happy to pay it, because it is a performance-based pay, lower than what they pay affiliates, and there is zero up-front cost to the service. In fact, the above mentioned analytics reports are free.

We’re targeting e-commerce PLATFORMS (as opposed to individual merchants); in this way, we’re able to scale up merchant-acquisition. We have 10 early-customer merchants right now, with about 100 more planned to go live in the next 2-3 months. By the end of next year, we’re targeting about 1,000 merchants and 10,000 merchants the following year. Our channel deployment model makes these goals achievable.

At something like a 5 to 10% service charge, and a typical merchant having between 500K to 1M in sales per year, this is a VERY profitable business model. That is, of course, if we’re successful… but we’re seeing very positive signs so far.

Technology

Most of our front-end stuff (like the merchant-dashboard, reports, campaign management) is built with Ruby on Rails. Our merchant integration requires browser-side Javascript magic. All our analytics (batch-processing) and real-time pricing services are written in Clojure. We use RabbitMQ for all our messaging needs. We store data in HBase. We’re deployed on Amazon’s EC2.

Here are a few blog postings about what we’ve been up to –

Distributed Clojure system in production
Using messaging for scalability
Capjure: a simple HBase persistence layer
Clojure in production
Experience installing Hbase 0.20.0 Cluster on Ubuntu 9.04 and EC2

We’ve also open-sourced a few of our projects –

swarmiji – A distributed computing system to write and run Clojure code in parallel, across CPUs
capjure – Clojure persistence for HBase

Culture at Runa

We’re a small team, very passionate about what we do. We’re focused on delivering a ground-breaking, disruptive service that will allow merchants to really change the way they sell online. We work start-up hours, but we’re flexible and laid-back about it. We know that a healthy personal life is important for a good professional life. We work with each other to support it.

We use an agile process with a lot of influences from the “Lean”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development and “Kanban”:http://leansoftwareengineering.com/2007/08/29/kanban-systems-for-software-development/ world. We use “Mingle”:http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-agile-project-management to run our development process. Everything, OK mostly everything is covered by automated tests, so we can change things as needed.

We’re all Apple in the office – developers get a MacPro with a nice 30″ screen, and a nice 17″ MacBook Pro.  We deploy on Ubuntu servers.  Aeron chairs are cliché, yes; but, very comfy.

The environment is chilled out… you can wear shorts and sandals to work…  Very flat organization, very non-bureaucratic… nice open spaces (no cubes!). Lunch is brought in on most days! Beer and snacks are always in the fridge.

We’re walking distance to the San Antonio Caltrain station (biking distance from the Mountain View Caltrain/VTA lightrail station).

What’s in it for you

• Competitive salaries, and lots of stock-options
• Cutting edge technology stack
• Fantastic business opportunity, and early-stage (= great time to join!)
• Developer #5 – means plenty of influence on foundational architecture and design
• Smart, full bandwidth, fun people to work with
• Very comfortable, nice office environment
• We have a “No Assholes” policy

OK!

So, if you’re interested, email us at jobs@runa.com

No recruiters please!

We would prefer folks who are already in the Bay Area (but if you not local and are really great let’s talk!)

The post Want to work at a Startup with Cool Tech? (HBase, Clojure, Chef, Swarms, Javascript, Ruby & Rails) first appeared on Cognizant Transmutation.

If you used something similar to the install process described in my earlier Deploying RabbitMQ and Stomp on Ubuntu you can do the following:

Update RabbitMQ server

For Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade rabbitmq-server

For Macintosh Leopard

Need to update the rabbitmq-codegen and rabbitmq-server using mercurial:

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-codegen
hg pull
hg update rabbitmq_v1_5_3

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-server
hg pull
hg update rabbitmq_v1_5_3

For both Ubuntu and Leopard

Update RabbitMQ-Stomp

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-stomp
hg pull
hg update rabbitmq_v1_5_3

You can see what release tags are available after th hg pull via the command:

hg tags

Make sure there isn’t already an /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf . If there is merge /etc/default/rabbitmq into /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf (/opt/local/etc/ instead of /etc if you are using MacPorts)

Otherwise just move it:

mv /etc/default/rabbitmq /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf

Rebuild the rabbitmq-stomp programs

Still in /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-stomp

For Ubuntu

make RABBIT_SERVER_SOURCE_ROOT=../rabbitmq_server-1.5.3 all

/etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server restart

For Macintosh Leopard

make all

If you updated rabbitmq-server make sure it builds and run

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-server
make -j run

If it starts ok you can quit and then from now on run it by issuing the command:

/opt/local/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-server/scripts/rabbitmq-server -detached

The post Updating RabbitMQ and RabbitMQ-Stomp to RabbitMQ 1.5.3 first appeared on Cognizant Transmutation.

Make sure that the erlang package is installed

Add a repository from the rabbitmq site

Set up Repository via the Synaptic GUI tool

(http://www.rabbitmq.com/debian/)

Set up Repository via command line

Ubuntu Documentation for Managing Repositories via the Command Line

How to use the RabbitMQ Debian repository and available RabbitMQ Debian packages

The repositories are described in /etc/apt/sources.list

So do the following:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line:

deb http://www.rabbitmq.com/debian/ testing main

Then update the apt-get environment:

wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc
sudo apt-key add rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc
sudo apt-get update

Install the RabbitMQ Server

Set up Repository via the Synaptic GUI tool

Set up Repository via command line

sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server

This should have installed the main portion of the code base in /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq_server-1.5.1 (The trailing version number may be different than 1.5.1)

After it installed the server, make sure its stopped

# /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server stop

Install rabbitmq-stomp

I could not find any ubuntu/debian packages so I installed it from the Mercurial repository. If you don’t already have Mercurial (the hg command) then you can install it with the following command:

apt-get install mercurial

Install the rabbitmq-stomp code

This also will go parallel to where the ubuntu package put the stomp server main code and the rabbit-codegen.

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-stomp/

Compile the stomp code

Build and test run rabbitmq and stomp via make

cd /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-stomp
make RABBIT_SERVER_SOURCE_ROOT=../rabbitmq_server-1.5.1 all

This should produce an output like:

mkdir -p ebin
erlc -I ../rabbitmq_server-1.5.0/include -I include -o ebin -Wall +debug_info  src/rabbit_stomp.erl
erlc -I ../rabbitmq_server-1.5.0/include -I include -o ebin -Wall +debug_info  src/stomp_frame.erl 

Add a file /etc/default/rabbitmq and Restart rabbitmq_server

You need to tell the main rabbitmq_server to load and run the rabbitmq-stomp stuff when it starts up. You do that by creating this file with the following content:

SERVER_START_ARGS='
  -pa /usr//lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq-stomp/ebin
  -rabbit
     stomp_listeners [{"0.0.0.0",61613}]
     extra_startup_steps [{"STOMP-listeners",rabbit_stomp,kickstart,[]}]'

Restart the Rabbitmq_server:

/etc/init.d/rabbitmq_server start

You can do a

ps -ax | grep stomp

and see an erlang process that is running the rabbit-stomp process.

Install ruby stomp client code and test

Install the ruby stomp gems

If you don’t have ruby already installed:

sudo apt-get install ruby
sudo apt-get install rubygems

Then install the ruby stomp gem

sudo gem install stomp

Run the ruby receiver client in one window

ruby /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbit-stomp/examples/ruby/cb-receiver.rb

In another window run the ruby sender client

ruby /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbit-stomp/examples/ruby/cb-sender.rb

In the receiver window you should see 10,000 test message lines:

...
Test Message number 9998
Test Message number 9999
All Done!

That’s it! Now you can use Stomp

(See later post Updating RabbitMQ and RabbitMQ-Stomp to RabbitMQ 1.5.3)

The post Deploying RabbitMQ and Stomp on Ubuntu first appeared on Cognizant Transmutation.

Though we are deploying on Linux, we do all our development on Mac OS X. It turned out that it was a bit more tweaky to get RabbitMQ to install on Mac OS X if we wanted to use the latest version of RabbitMQ and its underlying Erlang Environment.

So this is what we’ve done so far to get it installed.

Instructions Source

The core of this information came from the blog entry of Ben Hood, RabbitMQ contributor How I Install RabbitMQ On OSX

I’ve added a few things that were important in our environment.

Make sure MacPorts bin is before default bin

Your Unix PATH must have the MacPorts bin (/opt/local/bin before /usr/bin or /bin)

Ideally change it in the Mac OS X environment and not just your shell. You can use the RCEnvironment (Environment Variables) System Preference to set/update the PATH Environment variable. Or you can edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. Make sure that you don’t override this in your .bachrc or .tcshrc shell startup files. Or that you do it properly there as well.

This is mainly needed to make sure that you are using the python and python libraries from MacPorts and not the default Apple Leopard python in /usr/bin. It is also needed for the path to the Erlang binaries.

Install Erlang

* Use MacPorts via command line or Portecus to install Erlang. We did use R12B-5 with hipe, ssl, and smp options.
* Link erl_call into /opt/local/bin

UnixPrompt> sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/erlang/lib/erl_interface-3.5.9/bin/erl_call /opt/local/bin

Install Mercurial

This is needed to install RabbitMQ from the default branch (this is a stable branch but may be beyond the current release). RabbitMQ 1.4.0 will not work with Erlang/OTP R12B-5. Please use R12B-4 or earlier by default.

Get a Mac Binary package.

Install python simple json

Using MacPorts, you can use the following commands:

UnixPrompt> sudo port install py25-simplejson
UnixPrompt> sudo port install python_select
UnixPrompt> sudo python_select python25

Make sure that you have the right python in your path:

UnixPrompt> which python
/opt/local/bin/python

Get RabbitMQ via mercurial

UnixPrompt> hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen
UnixPrompt> hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server

Build and run the rabbitMQ

UnixPrompt> cd rabbitmq-server
UnixPrompt> make -j run

Should then see something like:

NODE_IP_ADDRESS= NODE_PORT= NODE_ONLY=true LOG_BASE=/tmp  RABBIT_ARGS=" -s rabbit" MNESIA_DIR=/tmp/rabbitmq-rabbit-mnesia ./scripts/rabbitmq-server
   Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.6.4  [smp:2] [async-threads:30] [kernel-poll:true]

   Eshell V5.6.4  (abort with ^G)
   (rabbit@xlr8)1> RabbitMQ %%VERSION%% (AMQP 8-0)
   ...
   Logging to "/tmp/rabbit.log"
   SASL logging to "/tmp/rabbit-sasl.log"

   starting database             ...done
   starting core processes       ...done
   starting recovery             ...done
   starting persister            ...done
   starting builtin applications ...done
   starting TCP listeners        ...done

   broker running

You are now up and running!

TBD: Figure out how to integrate it into Mac OS X so its treated as a system service started at bootup.

The post Building RabbitMQ on Mac OSX Leopard first appeared on Cognizant Transmutation.