no, really

As you can see, I messed around with my template a little.  I was getting bored with that default template, so I messed around a little.  It’s not exactly fancy, but it’s mine for now.  I’m sure I’ll muck with it as time goes on.

A little bit of news on one of the projects I was working on: Silicon Alley Insider has officially launched as of last Friday!  How exciting…  It reports on all things tech in the world, and more specifically New York.   There are still a few quirks to work out – mostly a result of the medium – but the content is great!

Meanwhile, we’re still searching for a developer for Noo.  I’m going to be honest – we’re not looking to be fly-by-night and blow up in users or make billions on advertising or anything cliché like that.  It’s a sustainable business model that is likely to turn into a really solid, profitable business.  It’s always good to get in on the ground floor of those.  Plus, we’re nice guys

I’m sure I’ve written about this in the past somewhere… buried in my posts. For the sake of emphasis, I suppose, I’ll write about it again.

Last night I sat down with Troy to talk about all the stuff you never get to talk about in meetings. Some of it was personal, some of it was business, some of it was my personal thoughts on his business. One of the big topics, which was an extension of a discussion that started in a production meeting a few weeks back, had to do with people wearing different hats in the organization.

I’m all for cross-functional team members when it comes to a very entrepreneurial boutique firm like MetaFoundry. We’re all really skilled and talented, and have interests in different fields, and are capable of doing great things in different areas. For example… I may be asked to do the db design on one project, and squeak out a few scripts on another, while participating in the discovery for a third. A designer might fiddle around with the CSS for a site to get it to do what they picture in their head.

One of the lines that I think is difficult to cross is the one that exists between the “supporters” and the “creators.” The creators are an eccentric bunch. At least the good ones are. They’re responsible for delivering great work to the people that request it. That can be any number of things from reports to software to pamphlets, etc. The supporter’s job is to make sure that all the creator has to do is create. No worrying about clients, scheduling, resources, lighting, etc… just create.

This can also be described as Joel Spolsky’s Development Abstraction Layer:
“With a software company, the first priority of management needs to be creating that abstraction for the programmers.

If a programmer somewhere is worrying about a broken chair, or waiting on hold with Dell to order a new computer, the abstraction has sprung a leak.”

It’s worth reading a couple times, but the point is pretty clear. In order for those creative (and therefore temperamental) creators to do what they do so well, they shouldn’t have to worry about stuff. Have you met many programmers that were good at project managing themselves?

What’s always the challenge is applying these idealistic concepts to a tiny, shoestring organization. I enjoy doing this: taking abstract concepts and figuring out how to make them work in real-world situations. It’s pretty much my job on a fundamental level. I’ve done it before with some other development concepts (I’ll be sure to talk about soon ), and this support/creative balance is at the core of it.

The glue that keeps these two halves together is process.  There are a few buzz terms in development that chastise the overuse of process, or extol the virtues of rigid processes.  The one that I always try to keep in mind is “people over process.”  In the end, a process is meant to *help* the people, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t serve a purpose.  If you can’t come up with a simple, easily justifiable reason for how a process helps someone, then it’s likely that it’s unnecessary.

On the flip side of that coin, a lot of day-to-day pain and suffering of either a creator or a supporter can be eased by establishing a sound process.  For example, the daily interaction between a project manager and a developer can involve a lot of back-and-forth of questions and answers.  The project manager will want to know the details of how and when a certain bug was fixed, and the developer will ask “what was that list of fields they wanted added to that form?”  Lots of back and forth gets tiresome to both people, as they’re constantly interrupted in their work.  If they had a ticket tracking system to post questions and look up details, they wouldn’t have to interrupt each other for mundane questions.  The process involved here is requiring them to *use* the system, and to use it well.  In the end, it’s to both their benefit.

And the key word there is “both.”

After months of screwing around with it, I finally sat and read a bunch of people’s blogs and documentation on it, and got rails running on my box! Yay! This will help a bit with some of the prototyping I’m planning on doing. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been fortunate enough lately to have no shortage of work to do. Actually, some would describe it as an overabundance, but I say no such thing! But it’s true, when it rains, it pours.

In addition to all the usual brain-scratching fun I’ve been having at MetaFoundry (where hopefully we’ll have the new site up soon), I took on a mini project so I could learn RubyonRails. It’s going really well! I’m now a fanboy. Go ahead, mock me. With the exception of the still painful server setup/config, it only took a number of days to get a catalog up and running. Big change from the old days, I’ll tell ya that much. The dark ages!

Next, I started working on a yet-to-be-announced project with some smart people looking to revive the profile of Silicon Alley. I’ll tell you more when we finally get it to where we can release it. Yesterday proved to be a very New York day in the alley. I met the ringleader of the project at a design firm on Broadway and Houston. As it turns out, they do MusicNation, which is Neil’s gig. So I drop Neil an email while I’m sitting there. He replies that he loves them and to say hi, so I do. It’s nice to make fun connections like that. Plus, it was a really great meeting. Then, we head back to the office to take care of the tweaks and changes, and witness a drug deal in the stairwell. Then we find out a laptop and router were stolen – likely by Verizon. Then I go to get lunch, and see a 6′7″ tall German man walking down the street having a philosophical conversation with three black little people. Seriously, I’m not making this up. Only in this town.

Another big dealy that I’ve been working on (which is keeping me up till all hours doing work) is with Mahdad Taheri over at TVI / Noo. He’s got a new idea of how to expand Noo to beyond just New Years, and he desperately needed tech help. I gotta say… I talked to him, reviewed the business plan he’d been working on, and it all looks good! Plus, I know how Mahdad is. He decides to do something, and he does it. No half-assed waiting for funding working 2 hours a week. It’s serious. So, I’ve joined him in this venture as CTO, which means I get to fill in all the tech bits of the business plan, set up a plan for development, find a developer, and get crackin! We want to launch it this summer so it’s ready and tested for gift season. I’ll fill in more details as we get close. Anybody know any developers??

It occurred to me the other day, there *is* a way to deal with stupid ringing cell phones in public places. We just need to get manufacturers in on it.

You know Bluetooth, right? Most cell phones have it now. More will as time goes on. Bluetooth has these feature/profile things where different phones can do different things like “send file” or “send my number” or “stereo audio” or just “headset”. They need to make a new one “silent trigger.”

Here’s how it works. Your phone has bluetooth. You go to the library. When you walk through the door, there’s a very small, subtle device that sits in the entrance, and as you pass by, it pokes the bluetooth on your phone and goes “hey, quiet place, go silent!” The profile on your phone detects the signal, and goes “okay, silent mode!”

Turning the ringer back on is your own responsibility, but in the meantime, all those annoying forgetful people who are inconsiderate and have their phones on loud ringer in church or the movies or concerts… they’d be silenced without any hassle!

Isn’t it brill?!

Maybe it’s patented… gotta look it up.

Update: looked it up, it’s not very popular or anything, but Bluelinx makes something like this.

I’ve had this discussion recently with someone, I can’t remember whom, about what services are appropriate as Social (government backed) and Private (hands off).  When it comes right down to it, I think there are two basic classifications for things that I feel are suitable for government support, whether it be financial or legislative:  public necessities (water, electricity, transportation, etc), and betterment of humanity (NASA, DHS, etc).  Bear with me, this is just a sketch of an opinion.

Now wikipedia is something that’s kind of controversial because of its very public and democratic nature.  Read that again… blah blah blah CONTROVERSIAL blah blah DEMOCRATIC.  This is a repository for information that uses the public for submission of information, and is continuously being checked by editors and experts for things like accuracy, balance and relevance.  It only accepts donation money, because many still feel that advertising would make it non-objective and commercial, which is not appropriate for a mass-encyclopedia.

Wikipedia also suffers from a very high barrier to entry.  In order to participate, you have to be able to speak the wiki language, which is not very easy.  It favors programmers in that way, so it is likely to have information highly skewed to the interests of those people.   In order to remove this barrier, it is believed that 30-50 full-time developers could comb through submissions and enter the information themselves.  This is unaffordable because of the lack of sufficient funding.

It just struck me that this could be a valuable public service, for the betterment of humanity.  And who better to help collect the 21st century’s information, as provided by the residents therein, then the Library of Congress?  It’s quite possible that funding, protection and staff from the LOC could give wikipedia what it needs to maintain its objectivity, to continue to foster democratic croudsourcing of information, and make it a reliable source of information for school children.

Besides, the $2M+ / yr that it would take to keep it up and running is a drop in the bucket compared to, say… how much it costs per year to clean the Capitol Building’s drapes.  And how often do you use those?

but someone heard my cry for a beta phone.  I can’t share any details (of course), but I guess I can share that it’s Windows Mobile based (which still sucks), and it’s got a very new “feature” that I haven’t been able to test yet.  I’m looking forward to seeing what it can do.  The device itself is pretty nifty, though – it feels right, and it’s a candybar – light and rugged.

Between being forced to use my old Nokia while in Indiana, and starting with this once I got back, I find that I’m kind of missing my Samsung.  It’s sitting here in pieces looking like it needs some triage.  Sigh.  Maybe I’ll learn to like the new beta device in time…

Finally Google has gotten around to pushing the Gmail Fetch tool! So far I’m quite pleased. But take my advice – if you set up your gmail to forward messages to your phone via sms (which I love), remember to turn that off before you set up the Fetch. Otherwise, you’ll get 300+ txts to your phone, which gets tired after a while. Glad I don’t pay for incoming txts. Other than that it checks for mail frequently enough for me, and I can read and reply to messages from the gmail app on my phone. How exciting!

There is a practice in the automotive world that is pretty well known to the non-car-obsessed person on the street: concept cars. Every day a group of creative out-of-the-box thinkers is working on a car that a) is designed for 20 years down the line, b) will likely never be produced or sold, c) probably will require a tow truck to move it (not designed to drive), and d) has a slew of totally bizarre and that’ll-never-work toys built in. We’re talking 20-foot long 20 inches tall, made of 90% crystal clear aluminum and 10% Kevlar, has headlights that blink like eyeballs, seven tires, and a collapsible bicycle that fits in the trunk. Totally impractical.

These little expensive useless toys are the cornerstone of the automotive industry. A few times a year, at the really important car shows, every automaker drags out their latest concept, sticks it on a rotating platform with wacky lighting and Carmen Electra’s hot twin sister wearing a napkin and some dental floss, and says “look what we can do with $20 million!” It’s the Miss America pageant of the car world.

Automakers give the “paper” designers all the latitude they could dream of to draw pictures of a beautiful car. Then they give their R&D people lots of caffeine and a new server to render their CAD drawings so they can make current equipment better, and invent the rest. And right on down the line, they encourage their concept workers to go crazy with their work; to make the fastest, coolest, flashiest, shineyist, sexyist car on the planet.

Nearly all of what goes into a concept car is piled in the ash heap each year, but from those embers the designers and the engineers get fantastic ideas for next year’s vehicles. They get feedback from journalists and enthusiasts. They realize that they can make that crazy idea work, so they build it.

I love this institution. It’s a piece of my childhood mind that I still have to this day. When I check out those concept cars in person, I think back to all the concept cars I experienced since I was little. My imagination clicks on, and suddenly I’m there, in the driver’s seat, pushing all the buttons and shifting it in gear, and rounding the curve at top speed. On more than one occasion, I think I’ve drooled.

Then I got to thinking: why doesn’t this exist in software? I mean, it kind of exists in the form of betas, but by the time something gets to beta or even alpha stage, it’s far beyond the “concept car” stage. Unlike a beta, a concept car is never meant to be built – that’s not the point. Google has Google Labs, but even that is more of an incubator of betas than a showcase of concepts.

Who is out there dreaming up the next big idea in design? Or the next AJAX? Where’s the big show where Google and Yahoo! and eBay and AOL bring their (semi-functional) concept sites to show off their amazing designers and brilliant engineers? This could be a practice that everyone can get in on. Any product that is meant to last more than one cycle needs to have this concept phase. We need to take our dreams of what’s next and make them a reality in earnest.

I guess maybe the reason this doesn’t exist yet is because the software (specifically web) industry is still working on getting their version of the internal combustion engine working right without breaking down. It took Ford a while before he could start getting creative with his horseless wagons. But then again, maybe it’s time to start pushing ahead instead of trailing behind. If for no other reason than it’s fun.

I’ve been working on this one for a while, and I knew it was going to be a biggie, but… If I went a little overboard, let me know. Also, feel free to splash some cold water on my face if you think I’m being stupid, that’s what talking’s all about!

A couple weeks ago, I took the time to watch the State of the State address given by the newly inaugurated Eliott Spitzer. I haven’t been a big follower of his in the past, but from what I do know, he was the “ethics is black-and-white” watchdog of Wall St. while he was Attorney General.

Two of the big themes that I was interested to hear in his speech were “Spending Requires Accountability” and “the Innovation Economy.”

Spending Requires Accountability

This is a pretty important theme these days. With all the news of accounting scandals, and embezzlement from schools, everyone is going to have a bit of spendthrift on their brains. Grab any old schmuck off the street and ask them how they feel about school taxes, and you’ll get an earful. What Spitzer repeated throughout his speech was “I want to give more to education, but I want to make schools accountable for that money.” He doesn’t propose signing lots of big checks to underprivileged schools and walking away, he wants to give them what they need to do well, and then require that they prove it was a worthwhile expense.

Yes, I am aware there is a lot of contention to this concept because schools and likely teachers will have lots more work to do to show that the funds are being put to good use. But when it comes to compensation, what’s a better measure than performance? Surely he doesn’t put forth A Modest Proposal to deal with the schools that don’t meet their goals. But in the meantime, how better to squeeze out the embezzlers than to make them work for every penny? Government money isn’t free money, people – it was earned on the backs of hard working citizens.

Innovation Economy
Key to Spitzer’s plans for education is the idea that students need to be trained and prepared to compete in the new economy – the information economy. Just speaking English isn’t enough these days, it helps if you speak Java and SQL too. For years people have been complaining about how outsourcing will make it impossible for skilled workers to get jobs in the US, and now, Spitzer is proposing a solution. Instead of complaining, or making it harder for companies to do business with overseas firms, why don’t you make your own workforce better? And how do we do that? Education!

By getting the right programs in schools, and bringing technology into the classroom, these kids will have the opportunity to really learn something that they can use in their life. By being skilled with all facets of high-tech, a graduate can be competitive in almost any field – science, English, mathematics, arts… And when these kids grow up and graduate from the similarly well-equipped state college, they will have excellent skills, get good jobs, and be able to afford to live here and contribute back to the local economy!

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