Lawrence Krubner

Past

• Programmer at MyBailiwick
• Software architect / lead programmer at The Second Road
• Computer programmer at AudioLunchbox

• Computer programmer at Bluepie
• Computer programmer for music store at Monkeyclaus
• Lead computer programmer at Bluewall LLC
• Computer programmer at Monkeyclaus
• Computer programmer at Bluewall LLC
• Lead computer programmer at iHanuman
• Computer programmer at Category 4
• Computer programmer at Danforth Diamond
• Editor and designer at Warren Robbins
• Graphic designer at Roulhac Toledano
• Computer programmer at Architextiles
• Designer and programmer at Alex Marshall

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Recommended

1 person has recommended Lawrence

Connections

53 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Company
• My Website

Lawrence Krubner’s Summary

At this point, my focus is on helping entrepreneurs start a web-related project and refine their business model. Most of my experience is with projects whose initial 6 month budget was in the range of $10,000 and $100,000. If your project is in that range, my advice will be especially relevant to you.

I've seen almost $1.5 million wasted on mistakes that I think can be easily avoided. Certain mistakes seem to repeat with every project:

1.) Too much brainstorming.

2.) Trying to be all things to all people.

3.) Feature fetish: “The more features I add, the more popular my web site will be.”

4.) Wildly unrealistic ideas about how popular a site will be.

I've written an essay called "How much do websites cost?" It summarizes most of the mistakes that I've seen made during the last 9 years:

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2008/11/12/how-much-do-websites-cost/

If you are considering launching a new venture, I suggest you read that essay. If you like my advice, then you should contact me and we can talk about your project.

My cell: 434-825-7694

email: lawrence@krubner.com

Lawrence Krubner’s Specialties:

Computer programming, PHP. Analysis of business models. Developing traffic for websites.

Lawrence Krubner’s Experience

• Programmer

  MyBailiwick

  (Computer Software industry)

  April 2009 — July 2009 (4 months)

  At MyBailiwick, we are developing what we hope will be the industry leader in software for crowd-sourcing sites that offer payments for answers.

• Software architect / lead programmer

  The Second Road

  (Non-Profit; Health, Wellness and Fitness industry)

  June 2007 — April 2009 (1 year 11 months)

  I was lead programmer at The Second Road last year. I remain a part-time consultant with them. I'm now more focused on their marketing than their programming. I've become fascinated with what, exactly, drives traffic to a site.
  
  I've learned to ask "Which sites are upstream?" For large sites, such as StumbleUpon, the question is "How can we get more traffic from this site?" For small sites, such as a blogger on Blogspot, the question is "How can we get more of these to link to us?"
  
  We spent a lot of time trying to find a marketing firm that we could hire. We were disappointed by most of the folks we talked to. They were fuzzy. What we wanted was a scientific approach. If, for instance, we spent $100 buying an ad on Facebook, how many people would that bring to our site? What if instead we hired a well known blogger? Everything needs to be tried, using small amounts of money. This research is ongoing.

• Computer programmer

  AudioLunchbox

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  July 2008 — December 2008 (6 months)

  System administration work included setting up scripts to manage the daily backup of the database, cleaning up the output of old cron scripts, and adding in an NFS network for the various servers that make up the site.
  
  Also adjusted templates and added in additional pay options to the site.

• Computer programmer

  Bluepie

  (Internet industry)

  June 2008 — December 2008 (7 months)

  Building a backend portal to automate the import of content from the many music labels that sell their music through this site. The new portal is written in PHP, using the Symfony framework.

• Computer programmer for music store

  Monkeyclaus

  (Museums and Institutions industry)

  March 2006 — February 2008 (2 years )

  We re-used some technology from the iHanuman site to build the Monkeyclaus site. This project was much bigger than the iHanuman project, because I also built an automated system for importing the data. The musicians I spoke to were embedding information about their songs into their MP3 files, using iTunes, on their own computers. They wanted to be able to upload those MP3 files and have the server read all the relevant information about that MP3 from the embedded information (retyping the information using forms on a web page would have been huge waste of time). So we built a completely automated import system, that scanned uploaded files, extracted information from each file, and stored the information in the database.
  
  We also built an affiliate system, allowing members of the site to hype the music they personally loved, on a page that was treated as their own personal store, and when sales were made from that page, that member received a percent of the sale.

• Lead computer programmer

  Bluewall LLC

  (Computer Software industry)

  June 2003 — February 2008 (4 years 9 months)

  Peter Agelasto, who owns monkeyclaus.org, also owned Bluewall LLC. We tended to think of Bluewall as being focused on software, whereas monkeyclaus was focused on content sites. Over the years, to help fund operations, we took on quite a bit of outside work, building websites for various clients. A few examples:
  
  http://www.mywintergreenhome.com/
  
  http://www.wintergreenperformingarts.org/
  
  http://www.brendarawls.com/

• Computer programmer

  Monkeyclaus

  (Music industry)

  April 2002 — February 2008 (5 years 11 months)

  I worked at Monkeyclaus on and off for 6 years. I was the lead computer programmer. I worked with a team, which varied in size over time, but which generally consisted of a beta-tester, another PHP programmer, a Flash programmer, a writer, and 2 or 3 graphic designers.
  
  In 2002 and 2003 I worked on the PDS content management system. It was written in PHP/MySql.
  
  In 2005 I was inspired by Clay Shirky's essay "Ontology is Overrated", which lead us to create Accumulist.com. This was meant to be a site like Furl or del.icio.us or Digg, but work on the site was abandoned before it was complete. Nevertheless, the site was made live to the public.
  
  http://www.accumulist.com/

• Computer programmer

  Bluewall LLC

  (Computer Software industry)

  September 2007 — November 2007 (3 months)

  We were interested in aggregating data from multiple XML and RSS feeds to produce HTML sites that humans (rather than machines) would want to interact with. I wrote scripts that parsed inputs from Yahoo Pipes and other RSS sources, to produce unified streams of HTML output.
  
  An example:
  
  http://www.bluewallllc.com/channels/acupuncture/pages.php?feed=AcupunctureMeridians

• Lead computer programmer

  iHanuman

  (Health, Wellness and Fitness industry)

  September 2006 — October 2007 (1 year 2 months)

  I was lead programmer for the iHanuman yoga video site. We built a site that provides visitors with an intuitive way to find the teachers and styles of yoga they are seeking. We also built a backend administrative section to the site, which provides the staff at iHanuman with an easy way to add more content to the database.
  
  Starrie Williamson handled the Flash programming. The media player she developed can be embedded on other people's sites, yet show content from the iHanuman database. We jointly developed a system of whereby my PHP code would pull data from the database and store it as XML files, and her media player would then look up the correct XML file and use the data to show what was in the store.
  
  This site has become a highly successful yoga site, and was written about in the December, 2007 issue of Yoga Life magazine.
  
  http://www.ihanuman.com/

• Computer programmer

  Category 4

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  June 2006 — January 2007 (8 months)

  Category4.com is the most successful web design firm in central Virginia. I worked there as a PHP programmer. I worked on such sites as Shenandoah Shakespeare (worked on the calender) and World Strides (built an image gallery).
  
  http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/
  
  http://www.worldstrides.com/

• Computer programmer

  Danforth Diamond

  (Luxury Goods & Jewelry industry)

  March 2005 — November 2005 (9 months)

  Off and on, for a period of a few months, I helped prepare the graphics for the initial roll out of the Danforth Diamond website.
  
  I wrote macros in Javascript to automate some of the production work of the graphic designers. Adobe had recently enabled an advanced degree of automation through scripting. My scripts helped the designers in their work with Photoshop and InDesign.
  
  The inventory database lived on old server that did not have PHP installed. It did have Perl installed. Information from that database needed to be made available to the website. For security, the server with the database was not connected to the Internet. So we wrote some Perl scripts that pulled data from the database and then stored it on the server that holds the website.
  
  Finally, I worked with a team of 5 to build the site. The site is written in PHP and uses the Smarty template system.
  
  http://www.danforthdiamond.com/

• Editor and designer

  Warren Robbins

  (Non-Profit; Museums and Institutions industry)

  June 2002 — October 2005 (3 years 5 months)

  Off and on, for several years, I assisted with the production of the memoirs of Warren Robbins, the founder of the National Museum for African Art. Roulhac Toledano had been hired to help edit Robbins' collection of essays, and she brought me into the project to help with some editing and graphic design. The book was published in 2006.

• Graphic designer

  Roulhac Toledano

  (Apparel & Fashion industry)

  January 2002 — November 2002 (11 months)

  Roulhac Toledano is an architectural historian. She also produced a series of scarves with architectural themes, with graphs of old structures printed on the fabric. In 2002, she was given a commission by the Jefferson Committee to produce such a scarf that highlighted the work of Thomas Jefferson. I worked as graphic designer to help her bring her vision to life. The scarf is now sold in the gift shop at Monticello.
  
  http://www.architextiles.com/tjscarf.htm

• Computer programmer

  Architextiles

  (Textiles industry)

  March 2002 — August 2002 (6 months)

  I handled most of the photography, design and programming for the Architextiles site. At first this was an eccommerce site using PayPal but later it was simplified, since most of the customers simply called the client to place their orders.
  
  http://www.architextiles.com/

• Designer and programmer

  Alex Marshall

  (Media Production industry)

  March 2000 — July 2000 (5 months)

  Alex Marshall is a successful journalist. He needed a content management system that would allow him to add his articles to the site as he wrote them. The system needed to be flexible enough that he could also use it for promoting his books and lectures.
  
  At that time, there were few obvious software systems that could meet the needs of this site (there was no WordPress, there was no Ruby On Rails), so I began work on my own PHP/MySql system (what later became the PDS content management system, which we used at Monkeyclaus for several years). This was the first website where I used PHP.
  
  http://www.alexmarshall.org/

Additional Information

Lawrence Krubner’s Websites:

• My Company
• My Website

Lawrence Krubner’s Interests:

I tried to list all of my work-related interests here, but I got carried away and wrote more than what LinkedIn allows, so I'm instead posting my list of interests on my own website: http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/my-interests/

Lawrence Krubner’s Groups:

•    symfony

Lawrence Krubner’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch