no, really

I’ve always done whatever it takes to get the job done, which often means learning stuff I’ve never done before.  In the past few months, I’ve done a lot of sysadmin work for myself – Ezra is rediculously amazing, but for the little stuff there was no reason to bother him.

In the past few weeks, we started moving all of Noo over to a server on MediaTemple.  We have been working with a gridserver, which felt kind of like bobbing for apples.  I mean, it can do the job, but you have to get used to having your hands tied.  Now that we’ve got a full dedicated machine, I can really stretch my legs and get things up and running, which has been a lot easier than I expected!  I’m appreciating all that I’ve learned from the talented people I’ve worked with.  They have good shoulders to stand on.

Plus, the speed increase is obvious.  I was wary of keeping Plesk on the box because it puts things in strange places.  But I’ve learned how it works, so I’m happy doing it both ways.

I’m still excited to be moving on this work now.  I can’t wait to start to see the results!!

I attended one of the growing list of tech-centered events in New York this evening. As someone who appreciates the value of these kind of events in New York for a long list of reasons, I have to say… it wasn’t that great.

First off, it’s too large to be intimate. When there’s 20 people in a room, you can expect to meet 2-3 at a time, over the course of two hours, that’s at least 6 minutes per group. Even that might be too much to meet everyone in the room…. This meetup was about 100 people, easy.

Second, with the growing number of these meetings, it’s harder for each one to have high-quality presenters, so each one is less concerned with the quality of the company or the presenter, and more concerned about getting those 3+ spots filled so there’s something to talk about every month. There’s nothing worse than a room full of people expecting to see a show, and having nothing to give them.

It’s also a bit reflective of the industry. It’s good that everyone is excited and getting off the couch and building their dream, but when there are more ideas like “it’ll send you an sms when you leave the refrigerator door open!” and “you can calculate exactly how many steps there are to your office, based on your height!”, it starts to get tedious.

Everyone goes to these meetings hoping to see something revolutionary, or learn something about how to build their own business. Instead, they get a sloppy elevator pitch and a half-working presentation of another me-too idea.

This is why I’m still keen on nextNY. Because there is no one person coming up with the meetings, and there’s no rigid schedule, and most of the activity happens in the online group, it doesn’t get stale. There’s no room for stale. The people in the group are working really hard every day on their dream/career/obsession, and only have time to come out of their caves when it’s really worth it.

This month, nextSports did just that. It was a bit of a Socratic seminar on sports and technology in New York, featuring some key attendees and a group of 50 eager, interested, relevant participants to ask questions and steer the conversation in any way they saw fit. I was the instigator and helped run the first Community Conversation and it was wonderfully successful. I’ve been very interested in contributing more, and realized a great synergistic opportunity:

Troy is launching Tiki. Tiki helps techies. Tiki needs publicity. nextNY is techies. nextNY CC’s need venues. Venues cost money. Troy can publicize Tiki by sponsoring a venue for nextNY. Run, Spot, Run!

I was out to dinner last night with someone who just recently switched from his Treo (which he loved) to an iPhone (which he loves).  He’s not gadget-obsessed, but he’s young enough that technology is just a part of life like cookies or sneakers.

His biggest complaint about the iPhone is that he can’t one-hand type anymore.  He got very used to being able to feel his way around the keyboard on the Treo and type without looking.  This has its upsides and down – typing while driving is bad, no matter how you slice it.  Now with the iPhone, there are no “keys”, so you really have to pay attention to where you’re poking on the screen.  On his way to meet me, I texted him, and he was forced (lol) to call me back and let me know he was 5 mins away.

He said it would be great if there were a functional voice-to-txt function on the phone, or a service like voice dial for texts.  I knew I’d heard of one, and when I got home, I quickly looked it up.  The first one I found, and where I stopped was Jott .

I figured they’d got funding and purchased some xerox-developed voice recognition technology or something that allows them to convert from voice to text.  They don’t.  It says  something like “it’ll take a few minutes, our operators have to transcribe the message to send it.”

Operators??  I thought the advantage of working on the web was to *reduce* human interaction with end users, so as to decrease overhead and increase profit margins.  I’m guessing their operators work from home and stuff, but how can this scale easily?

On top of all this… they still don’t charge for it!

This makes me think a bit about Mahdad and my venture, the people required, and what it’ll take for us to get it done with little-to-no financing and without charging in the initial term.  Sigh.  The first million is indeed the hardest.

I think I keep coming back to this post, and I’m not sure why. As anyone who knows me already knows, I’m reasonably satisfied with my phone. It works splendidly, and still gets the “wow that’s thin” comments I enjoy so much. I do wish I had a more functional device, but one that’s *actually* functional, none of this flash-bang stuff that’s all fluff and no substance.

Naturally, the closest thing to what I’m looking for is packaged in schmancy Apple design, but it’s only a reasonably close approximation. The two reasons I stayed away from the iPhone were 1) potential reliability issues in v1.0, and 2) price. I personally know a few people who got the phone the instant it came out, and still maintain the facade of elation.

But, just as I suspected, the honeymoon is over.

After the wow of the slick and prettiness has worn off, and the pixie dust has settled, you gotta ask yourself “does it really do what I want?” Fred says “nope.” I figured as much. When I’ve got a big purchase, I usually delay as long as I can to be absolutely sure it’s what I want and/or need. I was tempted by the iPhone, but the price tag turned me off from day 1. That and hassling with at&t for their contract bs.

Fred has some odd requests, like that it shouldn’t have a phone. He’s clearly approaching this mobile device thing from the other direction. While I’m a huge fan of using things *other* than the telephone to communicate over the course of my day (particularly loving using my bluetooth headset with iChat), when it comes down to it, I believe the phone has its place. Sure, Skype offers phone-like features, but after last week’s mysterious Skype outage, who do you trust more?  Besides, I think Fred’s opinions are colored by the build-your-own-mobile-device thing he’s invested in.
As everyone is, I’m curious to see if and what Google is producing.  I’m guessing it’ll be very g-app centric (which is fine), and there must be some ability for Google to stick their ubiquitous advertising in front of the user (otherwise, why would they waste their time?).  If we haven’t heard anything about it, I wonder – is it carrier neutral?  Is it only wi-fi?

I’m sure it’s going to be at least a year or so before a device really entices me to plop down a few hundred.

By now we’ve all read the wise opinions of Henry, Jason and Fred on how the current global financial woes affect the industry.  Overall sense: “negatively” with hope.  None of them seem to see this as another end-of-days, and after having experienced the bubble, we can all say that this doesn’t really resemble that.

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I started this one a long time ago, and never actually filled in any content. It’s something that I think about a bit when it comes to developing software. The temptation for anyone passionate about technology is to be inventive and clever about their development, in an effort to challenge themselves and maybe show off a little too.

This all came to me a while back when I was looking for a new cell phone. So many of the phones out there were either terrible or over-developed. One example would be the Nokia 7280 – an awkwardly sized phone with minimal display and no keypad designed to be “fashionable.” Just because you *can* make a tiny lipstick phone doesn’t mean you *should*.

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nextNY has always been a bit of a fascination for me in terms of organizational structure. It has no “leader” or “organizer.” There is no real group moderator, event planner, coordinator. All it has is a creator – Charlie O’Donnell, and members. How does it stay running and relevant?

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In my lead-in post, I briefly described the roles of the many and the few when it comes to software development. Volumes have been written on this topic, and it continues to be debated in conferences and whatnot. I’m trying to drag that Cathedral and Bazaar analogy to similar many/few situations and see if it still makes sense.

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Here it comes – the requisite position statement and analysis of crowdsourcing. It’s a little late – I didn’t ride that trend wave back when the scandal over the paying of select members of the crowd to do their thing broke. I was inspired by an article in “strategy + business” that talks about the parallel topic of crowds and open source software.

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As I mentioned previously, I’ve been cooking up a lot of new stuff this summer. I’m really kicking things into gear and putting in a lot of extra effort to push myself into doing what I really enjoy, and what I’m the best at. Specialization is tricky, and almost seems silly at a time when there is a lack of programmers out there!

After a lot of careful thought, and some talking it over with colleagues, I’m moving my services into a more architecture based area. I’ve always had a strong analytical bent to my thinking, which is why I’ve been so successful in my field. All of the terrific work I’ve done I would attribute to the thinking that came before it.

For the time being, I’m doing mostly what I’ve been doing in the past – programming. I’m fortunate enough at MetaFoundry to have the opportunity to shift a lot of my tasks into this new set of activities. Troy is both accommodating and appreciative of my new specialization in that regard.

You can check out what I’m talking about by poking over in the Services section in the sidebar. The people that I think would benefit from this kind of work the most are startups who are short on tech managers, and agencies that are more design centric. I’ve also got end-to-end experience with large, long-term projects within medium sized businesses. Pricing for the different services varies, and as things get going, I’ll set up a flat-rate fee structure for a few of the consultation activities to make it more accessible.

This is just the beginning. For now, my blog is a decent host. I’m working on a new name and site that will feature testimonials and resources for development, as well as an easy way to contact me.

ps. I must be serious if I’m working on this during a sunny summer Saturday!