Second Shooter

Photo Walk in Downtown Victoria

2011-03-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took the day off from work and went on a photo-walk with Deanna. We wandered all around downtown Victoria taking pictures of anything we found interesting. I had never done that before and I found it far more enjoyable than I expected, and I am already thinking about where we should do our next walk.

Change of Focus

2011-03-22T22:22:00.002-07:00

I have decided to change the focus of this blog. It was originally a place where I recorded my thoughts about software development and related issues. I have moved most of that content to my other blog: Leading Software. I will be using this blog as a place to upload photos, share personal essays, and comment on most anything else that isn't related to software development.

Hopefully the change will be interesting.

TED5000-C Install

2010-02-14T17:11:00.030-08:00

This post has nothing to do with software development, but I wanted a place to record my experience installing a TED5000-C from "The Energy Detective". My TED5000 just arrived the other day and I spent a couple hours on Saturday getting it all setup.

The first thing you'll notice is the box. The hand holding the wireless display doesn't look very comfortable.

When you open this up, you are greeted with smaller boxes for the three main modules and a set of installation instructions:

Unless you are pretty comfortable with the electrical system in your house, the included installation instructions won't be very helpful. The paperwork suggests you refer to the more detailed instructions on the included CD. That's probably a good idea.

Just don't stick that mini-CD in any slot-loading CD-ROM drives. You might not get it back.

The MTU

The first module, the "MTU" is the device that you install directly into your power panel. It detects your power usage and transmits that data using Power Line Communication (sending network data using power lines) throughout your home.

According to the manual, the TED5000-C MTU is designed to support "two-phase" power systems. I guess this is supposed to imply that it is designed for typical North American homes. Unfortunately, the guys at The Energy Detective seem to have fallen into a common error. While many people refer to North American power as two-phase, they are wrong. No homes in North America use two-phase power. What we actually use is a three-wire, single-phase, mid-point neutral system. You can read more about home power systems at Wikipedia.

You'll need to open up your power panel to install the MTU. Here's what my panel looks like.

To install the MTU you'll need a good flat-head insulated screw-driver. I also recommend removing all jewellery (including rings), wearing good rubber-soled shoes, and if you have them, a pair of good rubber gloves. There is a lot of juice flowing in your panel and you don't want anything going wrong here.

If you aren't absolutely confident you can do this safely, DON'T. Call an electrician.

First, turn off the main breaker to cut power to your entire house. Now grab your screw driver and take the cover(s) off your panel.

First you'll want to hook up the power harness for the MTU. This is a wiring bundle with a red, black and white wire. Find a circuit breaker that isn't driving a lot of electronics equipment (hallway lights, bathrooms, etc) and screw down the black to black, and red to red, on that breaker. It is critical you get this right.

In a split-phase system, the black wires are one 120V line, and the red wires are a second 120V line, running in opposite phases. You need to connect the MTU to one wire of each phase, ensuring it has a 240V supply. Finally, connect the white wire to the neutral bus in your panel.

Here is what mine looks like.

Now you've got a power supply for the MTU. The next step is to install the sensors around your mains. These are the two main power leads coming into your box. In my home the come up from the bottom of the box. While in others they down from the top.

The MTU comes with a wiring harness that has two round clamps on the end. Each clamp can be opened with a simple squeeze. You'll need to arrange one clamp around each main in your box. You'll notice a small red dot on each clamp. It is critical that both clamps have their dots pointed the same way with regards to the flow of current; either both pointed "in" or both pointed "out". These clamps will hang loose around each main. They do not need to be tight, but you should make sure they are going to stay put.

Be very careful when attaching these clamps. Even though you have turned the primary breaker off, the main lines are still live and touching the ends of them may be a lot more excitement that you are ready for.

Here's what my clamps look like.

Now that you've got the wiring harnesses in place, you need to connect them to the MTU and then find a good spot to place it. I just left mine sitting in the bottom of my box.

Here it is, all hooked up.

Don't put the covers back on just yet. You'll want to ensure everything is working first. To do that, you will need to turn the main circuit-breaker back on.

If you've hooked everything up correctly, the MTU should quickly blink green a few times then settle into a slower pattern, blinking only when it is transmitting data. If you don't get the proper lights, it's time to check the trouble-shooting manual. Chances are good that you didn't get your power-supply connected right.

If you need to go in and make any changes, don't forget to turn off the main circuit-breaker first.

Now that you have the MTU installed, the next step is the Gateway.

The Gateway

Now that the MTU is measuring your power use and transmitting that data across your power lines, the next step is to receive those results and do something useful with them. That's what the Gateway is for.

The gateway is a singularly uninteresting device on the outside. You plug it into the wall somewhere and then run a cable from the top of the device to your Ethernet router. That's it. But in those few steps a remarkable number of things are happening.

First, the gateway is detecting the Power Line Communication (PLC) from the MTU in your power box. Every few seconds it reads the new data and stores it in a history log.

Second, the gateway is running a tiny web-server. It gets an IP address from your router and begins server up the data from your MTU in beautifully organized graphs and charts.

Third, the gateway is running a small ZigBee transmitter that sends detailed power usage data to the TED 5000-C wireless display (see below).

Fourth, the gateway communicates over the Internet to Google's Power Meter service and records your household power consumption online so you can view it anywhere.

All that in a unit that looks just like the power-adapter for your telephone.

At this point you could stop if you wanted to. You now have power being measured at your power box, and being received and displayed on your local network. To see the results, just point your web browser at the IP address assigned to the TED gateway (TED includes a small program that helps you find this address if you don't know it.)

There are even a number of iPhone applications that can display this information on your iPhone or iTouch device.

If you've ordered the TED 5000-C, you have one more box left to open.

The Display

The last piece is a small, battery powered display that receives the ZigBee transmissions from the Gateway. This unit shows all the data available on the TED web browser, but in a small wireless counter-top device.

A few years ago this device would have looked incredibly high-tech. But these days with all the iPhone and iTouch devices around, the TED display looks pretty boring. But boring or not, it does contain all the information you would want and it's very easy to read.

Pressing the big button on the front rotates through various displays showing your real-time usage, daily power cost, monthly cost, predicted monthly bill and a few other options.

The web interface on the TED gateway gives you a set of tools for configuring the options shows on the Display unit, and it's pretty easy to use.

Summary

Setting this whole thing up took me just under two hours. It was pretty straight-forward though the provided instructions could have been a bit better. The results are pretty impressive though.

Do I have any complaints? Certainly. My biggest complaint is the power line communications used by the MTU and Gateway. Because of the way it works, the communications between these two devices happens best when the Gateway is kept far away from electronics devices with switching power supplies. This basically means that you cannot connect the Gateway to a plug anywhere near your computer, monitors, fax machines, UPS devices, etc. You also cannot connect it to a power-bar or power filter.

The problem comes when you realize that you still need to plug the Gateway into your Internet router. I don't know about you, but I tend to keep my router pretty close to my computer. Finding a power plug that meets the Gateway's requirements, but is still within reach of your Internet router could be a huge challenge.

My only other gripe is with the portable Display unit. Mine doesn't work. Or rather, mine stopped working. When I first set everything up I had no problems. But at some point during the day, the device stopped receiving data from the Gateway. Now it just reports zero values for everything.

I've followed all the trouble-shooting instructions from The Energy Detective and have arrived at a step that suggests I call their technical support department. Hopefully that resolves the problem. For now, I'll just stick with an iPhone application and the web interface.

Will the TED 5000-C change our power consumption? That remains to be seen. My plan is to take the portable Display around the house and teach my children how much power the various lights and utilities in the house truly use. My hope is that information will make them smarter and help them remember to turn out lights and devices when they aren't using them. If that works, I'm sure we can shave at least 10% off our monthly bill. If we get that far, the TED will have paid for itself in the first year alone.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Leading Software - a book in progress

2010-01-21T18:37:00.002-08:00

I am writing a book.

This book is about being an effective Software Development Manager. It’s not about how to follow a particular process. It’s not about how to build great teams. It’s not about how to estimate and schedule better. It’s not even about being a good Team Lead. There are already great books about those things and I’m happy to let them be. Instead, this book is about the hundreds of tiny things that make success in the role of a Software Development Manager so unique.

I am writing this book online, and you can follow my progress, provide feedback, and suggest ideas. Please visit the Leading Software blog to get involved.

What's wrong with Enterprise Customers

2010-01-05T12:31:00.005-08:00

I've been thinking about Tim Bray's recent article on what's wrong with enterprise software development. Tim compares the world of agile, iterative, rapid Web 2.0 development to the slow, document-heavy, front-end weighted world of enterprise software. The examples he gives are things like FaceBook, Twitter and a host of other Web 2.0 applications could never have been created if their authors tried to follow an enterprise model.

I couldn't agree more.

However, I don't think the problem is with the enterprise software development groups. These people, by and large, know that the process they are following doesn't work. They're not stupid. So why do they keep doing it?

I blame the customers.

I work for a company that makes enterprise software, and we do our very best to be agile, iterative, and light-weight in our processes. In general we are quite successful. However, we have one massive handicap that no amount of process can seem to overcome. Unlike Web 2.0 products, where customers begin using the product right away and give you valuable feedback as you go along, our customers tell us everything they want up-front and aren't usually interested in seeing the product until it is "done". With customers like that, the successes of Web 2.0 simply cannot be replicated.

Personally, I don't think we need to re-train the software development community. I think they're more than willing to adopt the techniques that have made Web 2.0 successful.

I think we need to retrain enterprise customers. They need to learn the value of working with iterative software. They need to be willing to use things that are partially incomplete, and work with developers to complete them.

Until enterprise customers change their approach and expectations around software, no amount of fancy process or evangelizing of enterprise developers will help.

Perhaps the biggest question isn't "what's wrong with enterprise software development?" but rather, "what's wrong with enterprise software customers?" If we can fix that problem, I predict that the massive successes of Web 2.0 projects and techniques will be mirrored to explosive affect inside the enterprise.

Getting Groovy

2009-12-29T19:18:00.006-08:00

I bought a new book just before Christmas: "Grails. A quick-start guide" by Dave Klein. It's only a basic introduction to Grails development, but it covers enough material to give you a good idea of what Grails is all about.

I started with the book just in time for shiny new versions of Groovy and Grails to be released. It's always great to use the latest and greatest - unless your book is primed for the previous version :-) Fortunately, not too much has changed in the core of the tools, so following along with the book was still pretty straightforward.

The book is a great start if you've never used either Groovy or Grails. It assumes you have a basic understanding of web-app development and are comfortable in Java-land (though non-Java programmers wouldn't find it too difficult either).

The "plot" of the book is to develop a single, usable, web-application to handle the creation and management of community-based technical conferences. The book is broken down into iterations (chapters) where each iteration builds on the one before it. In true agile fashion, some iterations re-work material from the iterations before and each chapter leaves you with working code and a sense of accomplishment.

Following along with the book takes about one or two hours per chapter, so it's a pretty quick undertaking. There are a few bugs in the book's code (maybe "half implemented features" might be a better term). If you are like me, those things will drive you batty. For example, in chapter seven I spent nearly four hours tracking down a bug that caused a blank header to be displayed in one of the views. In the end the effort was worthwhile because it taught me a lot more about the life-cycle and relationship between Grails controllers, views and model objects than the book itself. But it was a bit frustrating to see loose ends in the code examples.

Overall I've really enjoyed the adventure so far. Groovy is a terrific language and Grails looks like an incredibly fast way to put real-world web apps into production. Having done my fair share of old-school Servlet/JSP development, Grails is an incredible leap forward in productivity.

If you're looking for a quick introduction to Grails, I can happily recommend the book. If the author is looking for ways to improve the next version, I'd recommend some tips on logging and debugging (had to find my own way around these issues). Also, a caution is in order about the example code: if you are using the latest versions of Groovy (1.7) and Grails (1.2) some of the example code doesn't seem to work. Perhaps there is an easy fix, but being a total Groovy/Grails noobie, I haven't taken the time to find the solution yet.

Stick your IT in the cloud!

2009-12-15T13:03:00.006-08:00

In addition to managing the software development team at GenoLogics, I am also the manager for IT. When I accepted that responsibility, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do things the "traditional" way in IT. There was simply no time for it. I created a vision document for how IT should work at GenoLogics and called it "The Outsource Solution." The top of that document had a simple manifesto:

GenoLogics has no specific desire or reason to make IT a core-competency. In fact, the less effort we focus on IT skills the more effort we can direct elsewhere. What could we do if we chose to push as many of our IT needs as possible into the cloud?

We have been following this manifesto doggedly for the last eight months and the results have been everything I had hoped for. I need to indicate right here, that GLS is not a typical company. Everyone at GLS can manage their own computer well enough to deal with basic issues. We don't have complete computer noobies who don't even know where their USB connectors are. And for this reason, we can take a slightly different IT path than some organizations. However, as computer use becomes increasingly common with everyone, I don't think our situation will be that unique. Ten years from now and we'll be absolutely ordinary.

First, some background. I have worked in IT before. I know how fun, complicated, and rewarding a great IT infrastructure can be. I also know how self-serving and top-down it can easily become. I had no desires to repeat that scenario here at GLS.

So, what did we do? I could (and probably will) write lots of blog posts about it in the coming weeks. But as a simple overview of what we've done so far is:

Migrate away from MS Exchange to Google Apps.
Adopt a self-serve policy as much as possible for IT issues, backed up with good internal documentation.
Migrate away from a grab-bag of MS Server file shares and scattered NAS devices to a single, very large, NAS server in the center of our network.
Get rid of as much Cisco networking as we could and switch to Sonicwall, which is easier to configure and manage.
Switch our VPN from Cisco to Sonicwall.
Combine all our various WiFi access points into a single WiFi fabric controlled by Sonicwall.
Migrate all other required services from MS Server to Linux (DNS, LDAP, etc).
Ditch using MS Server to manage our printers and have people print to them directly.
Migrate our in-house Atlassian software suite to the externally hosted Jira Studio service.
Convert dozens of QA and build machines to a small cluster of powerful VM servers.

The next couple steps will be:

Take all machines out of our MS Domain and shutdown the MS Servers entirely.
Integrate authentication between Google, Jira Studio, and our internal LDAP server.

This plan probably looks like heresy to many IT pros. How can I possibly control what is done and how machines are managed? The answer is, often I can't. I don't want to.

It's my opinion that unless you work in a strongly regulated environment (like a pharmaceutical company) the only reason IT needs tight control over individual desktops is to keep people from breaking their own machines and becoming ineffective. However, as soon as everything is in the cloud, there's nothing left to break. Ergo: no need for central IT control.

When new employees start at GLS now, we give them a laptop that has been configured with a stock OS (Win7 Basic, or MacOS is just fine), a web browser, and instructions on how to login to the VPN and install Anti-virus software.

That's it. Everything else can be done from the cloud.

For employees that must have extra software, like MS Office, we order a copy for them and give them instructions on how to download the installer from the network.

We don't keep images of machine's hard drives. We don't have "standard installations". If a machine gets messed up we just re-install the OS and start over from scratch. It's quicker to re-do a machine from scratch than it is to keep an inventory of disk images up to date.

In short, as more and more data and services move into the cloud, the traditional desktop computer looks more and more like a really smart terminal. It's a commodity. And when it's a commodity, IT should be putting as little effort into it as possible.

There are some things IT may never pass off to someone else, but I'm not sure if anything has to fall into that category. But so much of what traditional IP pros try and make their responsibility could more easily be done away with. Let someone else handle the minor details. Let your hard-earned IT dollars be spent on something that generates more value than just creating disk images.

Why Zope won't Zip

2009-12-14T20:27:00.004-08:00

I really wanted to like Zope. So much, in fact, that I had one of my developers spend nearly three weeks preparing a case for why it was the proper platform for a new product we are creating. Imagine my dissapointment when three weeks later, this developer told me his recommendation was to not use Zope for our project.

No. That's not what I asked for. But I learned a long time ago to trust the people I've hired, and I wasn't going to start changing that now. But I did ask a lot of questions.

No surprise - since we hire such smart cookies - this developer had lots of great answers. In the end, it came down to two primary reasons. The first was ZODB. I realize that Zope really isn't all that much without ZODB, and that very fact is what nixed it for me.

We create Enterprise software. This means that we need clearly defined install, backup, migration, and validation steps for our software and data. We also need lots of our data in a tool that supports easy reporting: typically a SQL database. As soon as we have some of our data in ZODB (because Zope won't let you store certain things anywhere else) and some of our data in SQL, things have just gotten ugly.

Strike one.

The other major problem is the CPython GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) problem. In a nutshell, the typical Python interpreter only allows a single python thread to execute in the interpreter at any time. There are lots of pro-Python sites that will show you examples of how single-threaded execution is hyper-fast and that the GIL isn't a problem. However, on an eight-core server that is running multiple simultaneous web-sessions, having a single-thread of execution is like using only one-eighth of your expensive server. Sure it's not truly that bad because of I/O locks and other things that release the GIL, but it's nowhere close to what it should be.

In short, the traditional Python interpreter is a terrible implementation for multi-core servers. Given that this now includes pretty much every server out there, there is no way to justify using the current Python interpreter to create a server process like Zope. It's just wrong. Before long, a typical server will have 16 or even 32 cores. Pretty soon, people depending on Zope are going to start asking a lot of questions about why their killer new server doesn't seem very fast.

Stikes two and three. (Just not at the same time on two different cores.)

So, in a nutshell, three weeks of developer research uncovered two critical elements of Zope that have dashed any hopes of using it as the platform for a new server application. That's too bad, because at a high-level Zope has all the components we really needed.

So what have we decided to use? We're pretty sure it's going to involve Groovy. And quite possibly Grails. We've got another two-week spike planned for first thing in January. I'll update things here once that research is complete.

Prepping goodies for employees

2009-12-12T15:17:00.001-08:00

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Oh man is this ever freaky.

2009-12-12T12:12:00.001-08:00

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Nyah doing her best Coraline impression

2009-12-08T07:06:00.001-08:00

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Bludolph the Shriner reindeer (you can tell by his Fez).

2009-12-07T20:20:00.001-08:00

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Ice at the Tech Park! First sign of winter arrives in Victoria.

2009-12-07T13:39:00.001-08:00

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Makin pizza with the church youth group.

2009-12-02T19:59:00.001-08:00

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I'm a Nanowrimo winner! 50,314 words in 30 days. Too bad my book still needs 50k more words.

2009-11-30T19:27:00.001-08:00

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So sick today. Skipped church and stayed home to sleep. Haven't done that in a long time.

2009-11-29T19:56:00.001-08:00

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Ran the Gunner Shaw 10k despite feeling really awful. Unofficial time: 58:30.

2009-11-28T14:52:00.001-08:00

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What exactly is Stanfield's selling here?!?

2009-11-26T18:10:00.001-08:00

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This "puddle" is part of the 10k course I am supposed to run on Saturday. Can't wait

2009-11-26T13:44:00.001-08:00

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Got a new rug. Now the dog has a new place to sleep.

2009-11-22T21:55:00.001-08:00

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My 9yr old daughter says "don't be mad, this is funny." I'm not so sure.

2009-11-21T21:05:00.001-08:00

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Just entered the 25th Annual Harriers Gunner Shaw Memorial 10K Cross Country Classic

2009-11-20T18:50:00.001-08:00

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9 hour management meeting followed by dinner at Canoe.

2009-11-19T18:34:00.001-08:00

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Just picked up my daughter from the Kelly Clarkson concert

2009-11-18T23:03:00.001-08:00

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Icey cold morning. Sure grateful for my treadmill.

2009-11-18T07:33:00.001-08:00

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This is supposed to smell nice. The label seems to disagree.

2009-11-13T14:00:00.001-08:00

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Couch? Or a collection of brown marshmellows?

2009-11-13T13:42:00.001-08:00

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Lobby of the Ocean Point Hotel. What a great place to work on my book for #nanowrimo

2009-11-12T18:14:00.001-08:00

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Wish I was in the hand sanitizer business right now.

2009-11-12T14:02:00.001-08:00

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My daughter just nailed her AAA time in both 100 and 200m backstroke. Way to go Caesha!

2009-11-07T19:22:00.001-08:00

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Timing at the Island Invitationals.

2009-11-07T18:14:00.001-08:00

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Early morning run @ Thetis Lake.

2009-11-05T07:28:00.001-08:00

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Walking in Goldstream. Saw our first spawning Salmon of the year. Also found salamanders under some logs. Living here is so cool.

2009-11-01T15:50:00.001-08:00

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Best house on the street! Skeletons, smoke, party-goers, and everything else.

2009-10-31T19:22:00.001-07:00

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There must be sixty people in the same Cul-de-sac as us. Half are parents.

2009-10-31T18:54:00.003-07:00

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There must be sixty people in the same Cul-de-sac as us. Half are parents.

2009-10-31T18:54:00.001-07:00

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First Halloween where we've actually RUN from house to house. Crazy kids.

2009-10-31T18:49:00.003-07:00

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First Halloween where we've actually RUN from house to house. Crazy kids.

2009-10-31T18:49:00.001-07:00

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Trick or Treat!

2009-10-31T18:38:00.003-07:00

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Trick or Treat!

2009-10-31T18:38:00.001-07:00

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Best pumpkin at the #YYJ pumpkin festival.

2009-10-30T19:19:00.001-07:00

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Don't ask Google for your body temperature!

2009-10-27T13:53:00.001-07:00

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Ugh. Had to scrape the windows for the first time today.

2009-10-27T08:24:00.001-07:00

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Playing Uncharted Two and I got stuck inside a wall somehow. Love it when games glitch like this.

2009-10-23T09:37:00.001-07:00

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DIY photo studio in our living room.

2009-10-16T17:41:00.001-07:00

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BC Legislature at night. Down here doing some HDR photos

2009-10-09T18:57:00.001-07:00

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There just aren't enough great old bookstores anymore.

2009-10-09T18:22:00.001-07:00

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OK, we're not pros. But not too bad for our first vinyl flooring install.

2009-10-09T11:55:00.001-07:00

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At a windows7 intro. They're handing these out. Too funny.

2009-10-08T18:44:00.001-07:00

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Painting War Hammer models with our church youth group.

2009-10-07T21:57:00.001-07:00

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I'm sure Fall is coming, but it certainly isn't here yet.

2009-10-04T12:58:00.001-07:00

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It's sunny and 20+ degrees in Victoria right now. Absolutely beautiful.

2009-10-04T11:58:00.001-07:00

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David Garibaldi - performance painting. This is something unexpected.

2009-10-02T20:07:00.001-07:00

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Blue Man Group - 30 mins before the show

2009-10-02T19:33:00.001-07:00

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Mmmm, it's like popcorn for lizards.

2009-10-02T13:17:00.001-07:00

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I love living in Victoria - where plants like this line the entryway to the local swimming pool.

2009-10-01T18:27:00.001-07:00

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By the11th hour in the office things start getting a bit foggy.

2009-10-01T18:21:00.001-07:00

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I'm reading "Nurture Shock". As a parent, I'm finding the title is bang-on. Total Must-Read.

2009-10-01T08:31:00.001-07:00

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Meeting with the Vancouver Island Tech Park to discuss recycling programs this morning

2009-09-30T07:51:00.001-07:00

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GPSpy 1.2 Available

2009-02-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

Version 1.2 of my iPhone app GPSpy is now available in the iTunes App Store. The big change with this release is the ability to bookmark your location and then to Email those bookmarks to yourself.

If you do a search for GPSpy on You Tube you can find a demo video I put together.

Download the app, give it a try and let me know what you think.

First iPhone App - GPSpy

2009-01-17T06:39:00.005-08:00

I just completed the process of listing my first iPhone app for sale at the iTunes App Store. I've been working on a time and distance tracking tool for self-employed professionals. That application isn't finished yet, and I didn't want to use it as my first App Store experiment. Instead, I put together a simpler tool that I knew I wouldn't mind if it got messed up during the App Store listing.

I have called this first application GPSpy (pronounced "GPS Spy"). While it is very simple, it is also very useful. Basically, it makes all the internal GPS data from the iPhone available in an uncluttered interface. Previously, if you tried to use your iPhone for GeoCaching, mapping, orienteering or such, you'd have been frustrated because there was no way to get your actual GPS coordinates from the phone. GPSpy makes all of this available - nice and simply. You can check it out at the App Store.

If you'd like to download and try it out, it's only 99 cents. And if you do download it, please leave a review. Those are important for anything to be successful at the store.

The Experience

It wasn't hard to write, but like all software efforts, it took at least as much time to polish up the details as it did to write the core application. Then it took another chunk of hours to figure out the iTunes App Store and to get my software listed.

The good news is that I finally got it sorted out, and the next time I list an application it will be much easier.

Lessons Learned

You need a tax number from the IRS - even if you don't live in the USA. It's easy to get, but I'm not sure if I need to file US tax forms now.
Apple only pays you after you've earned $250 per "region" (Canada, US, Europe, etc). I don't know what happens if you have an unsuccessful application and you never get to $250.
Apple only accepts wire-transfer details for payments. If you are at a Canadian bank, this can be complicated and expensive. Some Canadian banks require US Wire Transfer to make three or four hops through other institutions. That seems like a great opportunity for your money to get lost. I wish they'd just issue and mail a check.
You can start selling your application without providing Apple with full bank information. You just can't get paid.
My simple application was approved in about four days. I know others have said it takes much longer - but mine was really quick.
I received an Email from Apple that my application was "Ready For Sale" nearly a full week after the application was ready and people had already started downloading it. You might want to keep a close eye on iTunes Connect instead of relying on Email notifications.
Getting your certificates and signing profiles configured correctly for Store deployment is complex. It was made even worse by a bug in Apple's Keychain Utility: it was creating new keystores for me without a private key, so I couldn't import the resulting certificates from Apple. Had to restart to fix that.
I was surprised that Apple's store only allows you to upload screenshots as JPG files and not PNG. Given that PNG is the native format for screenshots on MacOS this is weird.

Now that I have the whole process behind me it doesn't seem so bad. If you have any questions or you are looking for help in getting started, feel free to drop a comment to this post and I'll see if I can offer assistance.

iPhone and iBlogger

2009-01-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've been using my iPhone since I got it on the day of release in Canada last July. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has completely changed how I work and communicate.

Today I discovered iBlogger. Now that I can easily blog remotely I might be able to give more attention to my oft-ignored blogs.

Mobile Blogging from here.

Green Your Office

2008-12-17T13:54:00.003-08:00

I was looking for a way to kick-start discussions about how our office can be more environmentally responsible. I didn't want to use Email, because that creates too much noise, and internal chat wasn't permanent or structured enough. Then I remembered Ning.com.

After a couple hours of fiddling, I now have www.greenyouroffice.ca up and running.

If you are interested in discussing ways your office environment can affect the global environment, please drop by and consider joining. I know we all have way too many web accounts already, but I think this particular issue is pretty important. This community will only be as useful as the members who join and participate. Please consider being a part.

Business of Software 2008 - day two, part one.

2008-09-17T15:13:00.005-07:00

Steve Johnson
Steve is an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing. He is also one of the funniest presenters I've heard in a long time. Funny is good - it makes people sit up and pay attention.

Steve's presentation was a cornucopia (pulling out the big words today) of great quotes and pithy statements. Starting with my favorite: "Friends build products, enemies build documents." Are you friends, or enemies, with your development-team/product-management group?

Another great quote: "Remember, the 'L' in user is silent."

Most of us focus on stealing customers from "them" (our competitors), but who is talking to everyone else? Unless you already own the entire market, quit being so worried about the competition and focus on the non-users and evaluators.

Tom Jennings
Tom is a managing director at Summit Partners, a VC firm based on Boston. I didn't take many notes during his presentation, but I did learn a fair bit about how VC's think and work.

I think his advice for people seeking VC funding could be boiled down to the following points:

Find a firm that understands your space
Find a firm that can offer you concrete assistance with management, leadership, marketing, etc.
Find a firm whose people you'd be willing to work with every day
Avoid VCs who invest in multiple businesses in the same space - that leads to incentives that aren't in your interest

And to add my own advice (borrowed from Clayton Christensen's work): find a firm that is patient for growth, but impatient for profit.

Richard Stallman
The great geek icon of free and open software was (almost) everything I expected. I won't tell you exactly what I was expecting, but I didn't think I'd hear anything new or original from him. I wasn't dissapointed.

One idea he highlighted was how software doesn't suffer from the "perversity of matter". In software we can combine thousands of ideas from thousands of people with very little friction; at least, compared to doing the same thing when building something physical. This was a neat idea, and he provide a couple good metaphors to highlight it. Then he provided a couple more metaphors. Then a couple more. And a couple more. And more. OK already - we get it.

Most of his talk was centered around the evil nature of software patents. I am in complete agreement with Stallman that software patents should never have been granted in the first place. And I also agree that we'll have to eventually rip the whole software patent infrastructure up at the roots and dispose of it. I'm not quite as pessimistic about patents' current impact on the industry, but I agree that it is getting worse, and fast.

The other idea he shared was an analogy between composing music and writing software. Richard has been sharing this idea for years, and this part of his talk was nearly identical to the ideas he has presented a hundred times before. You can read a great summary of this idea here. If you are trying to get someone non-technical to understand the problems with software patents, this is a great place to start.

I couldn't help but think that Stallman would be more effective if he took better care of himself. I know he has a "geek reputation" to uphold, but speaking in front of a large crowd with a dirty shirt, stained pants, and socking feet, just isn't a good way to be taken seriously.

Noam Wasserman
Noam is a professor in the Business School at Harvard. I really enjoyed Noam's presentation style. I felt like I was back in school again, with Noam wandering up and down the isles and back and forth across the presentation floor. He asked us question and waited for the responses. It was one of the more engaging talks of the entire conference.

Noam presented some of his recent research on the "Rich vs. King" problem when starting a business. The essence of this problem is that most founders of a startup end up with one of two outcomes: they depart the business just as it is getting successful, but they become rich. Or, the stay at the business and help lead it into greatness, but they don't make the huge profits that often result in the other outcome. The academic community agrees that these two outcomes are well established. What isn't well understood is how a founder can choose which outcome they end up with.

Noam's research over the past decade has focused on this question and sought to understand the decisions that are pivotal in driving the outcome in one direction or the other. He shared some great startup advice with the group.

65% of ventures fail because of people-side problems.
Founders should not choose friends when looking for people to start a business with. It is too difficult and leads failure.
When dividing equity with the initial group of founders, the lead founder should propose unequal equity splits with dynamic adjustments over the first couple years. This keeps everyone focused and incents people to work hard. Many startups begin with 50-50 equity splits, but one founder works much harder than the other, leading to nasty breakups later on.
At the start of your business, hire jack-of-all-trades, not specialists. You don't know what you'll end up needing. Hire specialists later. When hiring, focus on "Mr. Right" not "Mr. Right Now".
If you are a founder and CEO, the best advice is to initiate your own exit before the investors do. CEO's who take this path end up wealthier and with greater control over the final outcome.

Y-combinator wrap-up

2008-09-11T10:54:00.002-07:00

Y-Combinator just wrapped up another semester. Guy Kawasaki has some great details on his blog. My favorite new business: Posterous. Imagine a blogging service half-way between Blogger and Twitter, and something as easy to use as Email, but way smarter.

I've just started playing with it, but I'm liking it so far.

Business of Software 2008 - day one, part two.

2008-09-10T12:20:00.004-07:00

Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh is the founder and Chief Architect of HubSpot - a hosted software service focused on Internet marketing. He's also the author of a very popular blog on software startups. His talk was titled "Software Insights from MIT: Two Years of Graduate School, Boiled Down."

Start your business FIRST. The good ideas only come later. It's interesting to me that this idea was repeated by at least three different speakers at the conference.
Write a blog, not a business plan.
Most startups SHOULD be embarrassed about their first product. If you're not, you waited too long to release it.
Get your product out there now. Charge early and charge often.
SAAS has much higher costs that traditional software sales. Don't forget to take those into account if you consider doing SAAS.
Consider measuring CHI (Customer Hapiness Index). Try to determine which features customers identify as the reason they stay with your product.
Parternships: DON'T. If you team up with a 900-pound gorilla, it rarely works to your advantage. If you team up with another small enterprise, you just have twice the number of problems to solve. I'm not sure I totally agree here, but most of the history I've seen would support Dharmesh's view.
Don't optimize your business too soon. Sometimes things will change drastically and your optimization will become a problem.
Create a Blog before the product. Use it to determine if there is interest there. Get your market risk down while the costs are cheapest.

One of the most interesting comments Dharmesh made was around Google Adwords. He reminded us that Adwords is an auction-based system. As such, you might be paying $1/click for some common phrases last month. However, some crazy new startup that doesn't know better could easily bid that phrase up to $5 before you notice and costs you hundreds (or thousands) of extra dollars you hadn't planned for. You can't control or predict this. Obviously Google doesn't care to protect anybody from this.

Round-Table Discussions
After lunch on day-one, we had a series of round-table discussions with groups of ten people. Everyone chose their topics in advance. I selected the topic "Facebook, Twitter and Web 2.0 - will they survive?" It was a pretty inflamatory title, but I figured it migh result in some interesting conversation.

The conversation really ended up with people sharing ways they have used Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to communicate with customers, recruit new employees, and market themselves. One business uses Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute status reports on the status of their hosted-service systems.

One group in Toronto had a Facebook group they had encouraged their employees to help build and invite people to join. One day they sent an unsolicited notice of a new product offering to this group; by the end of that day a good portion of the group had left. The interesting part was the people who didn't leave.

Others were using YouTube to publish internal videos, promo bits, etc. We've done similar things at GenoLogics, and I don't think this idea is particularly novel.

The consensus however, was that nobody was able to say whether these techniques were effective. Were these methods reaching new people, or people in a new way, that made them more valuable than previous methods? None of us were positive of the answer.

There was also an interesting discussion of just what Twitter is for. How are people using it that differs from merely updating your Facebook status on a frequent basis? Does Twitter enable something unique that Facebook does not? If anyone at the table felt this question was answered, it wasn't clear to me.

Jessica Livingston
Jessica is the author of the book "Founders at Work" and a founding partner of the seed-stage venture firm Y-Combinator.

None of the "famous founders" (Wozniak, Flickr, etc) knew what they were doing when they started. Most famous founders ended up becoming famous for an idea very different from what they started with.
Many of the greatest ideas were rejected at first. Wozniak tried to sell the original Apple-1 plans to his employer HP, but they weren't interested.
Early-stage plans change a lot. Sometimes the official idea gets in the way of the great idea. Flickr and Blogger are great examples of this.
Let your users design the product. Startups are flexible enough that they can do this.
The best ideas come from personal need.
Make something people want and don't give up along the way. I guess that's a lot better than making something everybody hates :-)
Perseverance is critical because your initial idea is probably wrong. Lack of determination is the #1 reason for failure in the first six months of a startup.
Adapt your idea. Commit fast and fail quick rather than waiver uncertainly.
Scratch your own itch and look for a way to expand its market.

I really enjoyed Jessica's presentation. I especially agreed with her suggestion that they best ideas start with a "personal itch" and expand from there.

I've run a shareware business for the past 16 years. These days shareware isn't a common term, but the idea is still alive and strong. During the past 16 years I've had three reasonably successful products (and a few not-so-successful products). I couldn't have quit my job on the basis of my shareware revenue, but some years it was in the five-figure range.

In every case, the products that I was successful at selling started their life with a personal need. I wanted a particular problem solved and found a personal solution that I liked first. Only then did I start taking feedback on how to evolve things. I am convinced that this is the best way to run a software business. It's certainly not the only way to be successful, but I wouldn't start my own business unless it was premised on a personal "itch" first.

Paul Kenny
Paul is a sales trainer from the UK. His purpose was to convince all the non-sales types at the conference why they actually need a sales force. His message in a nutshell: even the best products do not sell themselves everywhere; there will always be potential customers who would benefit from your product but who don't know that yet - this is what sales is for.

When hiring a sales force he gave the following suggestions:

Hire attitude first. Don't just hire for experience.
Reward things other than just the deal. Offer incentives for adding to the sales funnel, filling out customer profiles, building relationships, etc.

Next post: Day Two.

Business of Software 2008 - day one, part one.

2008-09-08T11:28:00.005-07:00

This blog entry (and the ones that follow) are a summary of my notes from the Business of Software 2008 conference that I recently attended in Boston.

First off, I have been raving about this conference ever since it ended last week. I've been to lots of great conferences before, but this one has just taken first place. To understand why, I'll be collecting my random notes from many of the presenters. Hopefully something interesting will come out of it.

Seth Godin
The opening speaker for the conference. He seemed to set the tone for the next two days. I've been a fan of Seth's work for a long time now and his presentation did not disappoint.

"Ideas that spread, win." This self-evident truth is often forgotten. Instead, business's often spend millions of dollars trying to win with ideas that don't spread. That's a receipe for losing tons of cash.
"Your job is to spread ideas." This is a bit more surprising. I thought my idea was to build software. But no, at the heart of it my job is to spread ideas about software process, development strategies, customer needs, etc. As I spread those ideas, the business moves forward.
"Build stuff for the new medium." This is the crux of Seth'd preaching. The new medium is what it is. People use it the way they do. You won't change that quickly. Instead, find a product or service that exploits this way of doing things. That will make your idea much more likely to spread. Seth's Squidoo is an attempt to do this.
"Commitment before success." Seth's blog, which is now hugely successful, took nearly four years of his personal commitment before it started having any effect. Are you that patient?
"Successful businesses connect their customers to each other." Through community blogs, user groups, or whatever, getting your customers to talk to each other is a critical step today.
People who have read Seth's material will recognize the following diagram. If you haven't, pay careful attention. This is very different from the regular way products are marketed.

Jason Fried
Jason is the found of 37signals, the developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails. I love many of Jason's products, but I really disagreed with much of his presentation. He spoke about his experiences developing products for 37signals. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of assuming that his experience - a single data point - should be extrapolated to the entire software development arena. If he had been more careful to express his views as "his opinion" or "in our experience" I wouldn't have had the strong negitive response that I did.

As it was, hearing someone stand up and say, without qualification, that "Personas are BS" made it difficult to take the rest of his presentation seriously. That's too bad, because he had a lot of good stuff to say.

One of the more interesting comment he made was the advice to "find the right size for your business, and then don't let it get any bigger." This is a clever idea, but it had a lot of people perplexed. What if you product is awesome and thousands of people want to pay you for it? Do you just randomly turn half of them away because that would make your business bigger than you wanted? I suppose you could, but a lot of people found this answer unsatisfactory.

If Jason had a theme it was probably something like "only do what you have to, and decide what you don't want to do." For example, he revealed that 37signals essentially discards all the feature requests and suggestions from their customers, instead deciding to do only whatever they feel like doing on their own. That sounds less like a good bit of advice and more like a business that has been lucky and successful despite how they choose to operate.

I did like his advice to "Curate your product. Say 'no' more often than you say 'yes'". In other words, don't let your product become cluttered with features and widgets it doesn't truly need. As he said, "If something in your design doesn't change a user's behavior, get rid of it." The example he gave is the labels we always see at the top of every table. If it's obvious what each column contains, then get rid of the labels - they don't do anything.

Eric Sink
Eric is the founder of "SourceGear" and author of the book "Business of Software". He gave a great presentation on "What does a Product Manager do?". He used the analogy of parenting to show how all product managers take their products (babies) through six distinct stages.

Prepare

This is conception and pregnancy
Happens before the first release
Dev Team is the mother, Product Manager is the father
Most important stage in any product's life

Care

Version 1.0
Get messaging and launch right
3am Feedings (tech support firedrills)

Listen

Between versions 1.0 and 3.0
Product exhibits its own will
You can still tweak the strategy before it hits mainstream
Customers start wanting things
Must cross the chasm or die (ie. BeOS, Newton, etc)

Talk

Elementary school to adolescence
Version 3 - mainstream
Most people can use your product
Ignore the competition. If you don't have differentiation by now, you never will
Customers need information: product comparisons, white papers, demos, etc

Transition

Teenager years
Post 3.0 releases
Rebellion
Asking for things they don't need
Time to steer the product a bit less
Let product be what it wants to be
But, don't let it ruin its life
Never let a bad release ship at this stage, you won't recover

Letting Go

Adulthood
Maturity, let it go
Let Marcomm and CS support and handle it
As Product Manager, your job is done. Move on to the next product
Failures at this stage: Windows, Office. They are done, just let them ride.

I really enjoyed Eric's presentation and came away understanding the role of Product Manager a lot better.

My next post will contain the rest of day one, including Dharmesh Shah, Jessica Livingston, Paul Kenny and details on the table sessions and reception.

People as Clocks

2008-08-31T17:20:00.004-07:00

Deanna and I were walking around the lake this morning. As we passed people going the other direction we'd usually hear one of two things: "Hello" or "Good Morning". However, as I paid more attention I realized that I never heard "Good Morning" - it was always getting truncated to "Morning".

That's when I realized I also heard people say something similar after lunch: "Afternoon", or when walking at night: "Evening".

Are these people greeting me, or telling me the time of day?

I think when I walk around at lunch time I'm going to start greeting strangers with a cheerful "12pm", or when walking in the morning I'll use a bright and sunny "6am!" Now when people pass me they will now know I'm happy to see them and what time of day it is.

I'll be polite and useful.

Genopalooza 2008

2008-07-18T16:16:00.004-07:00

Genopalooza 2008 took place yesterday. This is the second Genopalooza I've attended, and the third that GenoLogics has held. This year the event was held at the Mews Conference Center on the beautiful Royal Roads Campus.

Our agenda was like this:

8:00 - Breakfast
8:30 - Opening Remarks
8:45 - Keynote Presentation. "Life is Frantic at Frantic Films" - Jamie Brown, CEO, Frantic Films
10:15 - break
10:30 - We held a World Cafe to discuss our corporate values and some of the lessons we might learn from the Keynote presentation.
11:30 - Everybody lined up outside for an all-hands corporate photo. We were lucky to have the most beautiful woman in the world taking our photos - my wife.
12:00pm - Lunch, which was very good. Kudos to Royal Roads
1:00 - At this point everyone selected one of two possible workshops. The first, "Changing Shape, Shaping Change" was presented by Rock, Paper, Scissors. The second was "Team Decision Making" presented by The Berrant Group. By all accounts, they were both excellent.
4:00 - break
4:15 - Rock, Paper, Scissors presented a hilarious improv-based Game Show called "Logic or GenoLogics". For the next 45 minutes they had everyone howling - even the eight poor souls that were asked to participate. Somebody shot a shaky video clip of part of the event.
5:00 - closing remarks

Everybody was then invited to meet downtown at the Sticky Wicket Pub for some roof-top beach volleyball, great food, and hanging out.

It was a terrific event and everybody had a great time. Once of the best parts of Genopalooza is seeing the remote employees from all around the world who fly in to take part. If you didn't get to be there, consider becoming a GenoLogics employee, and then we'd love to have you!

How to read a book

2008-05-23T16:17:00.003-07:00

Seth Godin has an excellent blog entry on how to get the most from reading a business book. As someone who is passionate about books and about reading, this really got my attention. In his post he talks about programmers reading programming books, and how just reading the book doesn't make you a better programmer.

He then goes on to list three steps for how to properly read a business book. (Go ahead and read the post. I'll wait...) As I was reading his ideas I couldn't let go of his programming example. When is the last time I followed his advice (or anything like it) while reading a programming book? I mean, really followed it?

Or when is the last time I followed his advice while reading a self improvement book (like Covey's Seven Habits)? Or when reading a cook book? Or...or...or...

I think Seth's suggestion goes far beyond business books. In fact, when you read any book that isn't for pure entertainment, you should consider Seth's suggestions. Anything else is probably just wasting your time.

Product of the Year Award!

2008-05-16T06:58:00.004-07:00

Last night at the Vancouver Island Technology Awards (VIATeC), GenoLogics took home the "Product of the Year" award for Geneus. We also announced at that time that Geneus has been selected by Pfizer for use in their brand new Cambridge System Biology lab. Way to go GenoLogics!

Do you sell to BOTH of your markets?

2008-05-08T20:56:00.004-07:00

Every business, at least every business that is successful, knows what's its primary market is: scientific equipment buyers; over-priced coffee consumers; low-cost chiropractic patients. Could be anything.

But do you know about your other market?

I can hear you now... "Oh great dispenser of wisdom, what is this market?" Well, let me give you a hint: have you tried to hire an excellent software developer lately? Let me tell you, it's hard. Really hard.

I'm trying to hire four developers right now. Unfortunately for me I'm having a tough time finding people with the smarts, drive, talent, and special-something that makes for a great GenoLogics employee. But that's not why I'm writing this post.

The point of this post is that all my hiring pain has made me realize that there is a second market that our we haven't properly focused on. A market that is absolutely critical to our business success. A market that no business can afford to ignore, but which is often unnoticed. It is the market for talent.

In a traditional market your business is likely trying push some product or service into the hands (or minds) of its customers. This is done through sales channels, distribution mechanisms, advertising and revenue collection models. You do all this while competing against other businesses selling products to those same customers. Standard Harvard Business School stuff.

The good news is, once you recognize it, the market for talent is familiar in some important ways. You just need to relabel a few things and it all becomes clear. For example the product you are selling is a job. The revenue you are hoping to collect is the time and attention of a potential employee. That part is straightforward.

But what changes when, instead of a point-in-time purchase like a cup of coffee, you are trying to sell something that requires your customers to commit the majority of their time and effort to your product? All of a sudden your product starts looking less like that cup of coffee, and more like a fitness membership.

So what is your sales channel? How do you distribute your product? Do you have the correct marketing and advertising plan?

Your answers to these three questions can make the difference between a ho-hum hiring drive, and a remarkable recruitment effort, so think carefully.

Architecture Astronauts

2008-05-01T10:02:00.005-07:00

I hate it when blog authors just point you at someone else's blog and say "this is great". It's just a lazy way to fill up blog posts. Sadly, I'm going to be lazy today and point you at an article by Joel Spolsky on Architecture Astronauts.

This article really resonates with me. As someone who is trying to hire super-star programmers, and having an incredibly hard time finding them, I totally get what Joel is talking about. It would be one thing if I knew I was competing with other awesome companies doing awesome things. But I know that I'm often competing with lame companies solving silly problems and offering outrageous salaries. Just the other day I interviewed an awesome developer who decided he couldn't work for us because we wouldn't match the six-figure salary he was making writing gambling software. Wow! There's a problem that's really worthy of a brilliant mind and significant personal investment. Whatever happened to caring about what you are doing?

Just read Joel's article. You'll understand how we both feel.

In all fairness...

2008-04-19T08:00:00.003-07:00

Snow in April
Originally uploaded by cliffmccollum

In a previous post, I talked about mowing my lawn and snowmobiling on the same day. In all fairness then, I should probably admit that it actually snowed in Victoria in April. I woke up this morning and saw this image outside (please ignore how badly my deck railing looks - I'm halfway through repainting it).

I don't ever remember it snowing in April before, and it certainly isn't very cold outside (maybe -1 degress celcius), but it IS snow.

I bet the snowmobiling is awesome right now.

Another Successful Hack Day

2008-04-19T07:30:00.004-07:00

Another great Hack Day at GenoLogics has come and gone. I managed to spring myself from enough "manager" work to actually spend the majority of the day coding. It felt great to get my hands dirty again.

I spent my time on two separate hacks. The first was working through all the tutorials and sample code from the new Google Application Engine. I'm still waiting for an account so I can deploy my application live, but the local execution environment is a great way to develop and test things and it works really well. On the Mac be careful about putting tab characters in your YAML files - they seem to screw up the app server.

My second hack was more substantial. I began the task of creating a tool to track product feature requests, associated with customers and releases. We track this information internally with a couple other tools, but it seemed like a good excuse to hack around.

More accurately, I was looking for a good reason to play with Apple's Key-Value-Coding system and their new Core-Data APIs. I am very impressed with these two technologies. When combined, they make creation of desktop GUI applications even faster than the best web application frameworks. With almost no code, I had a full GUI that managed creation of three main data types, automatically loaded and saved these objects from disk, and automatically handled the relationships (both creation and cascade deletes) between them.

If you have the opportunity to develop software on the Mac, you will love this stuff.

Other hacks included Groovy integration into our core product; a really clever java-remoting hack that allows interrogation of every internal class in a JBoss server as if the classes were local; an excellent example of the power of Groovy and Grails to create a Bit-torrent searching engine; configuring OpenGROK to browse our internal code repository; a set of automatically generated class relationship diagrams crossing our entire code base; and many more that I haven't listed.

I didn't win any prizes this year (it's a random drawing from all hack authors), but the pizza was excellent and it felt great to stretch my coding muscles again.

Do You Hack?

2008-04-12T08:13:00.003-07:00

At GenoLogics we have a "Hack Day" every quarter. The next event is coming up on April 18th. Everybody loves these days and the generated output is always amazing.

Yesterday I was talking with someone at work about the phrase "Hack". He said when he was in school (let's just say that they coded micro-controllers in HEX back then), that the phrase "Hacking" was considered great praise. Someone who was a Hacker was an awesome example of programming genius. He asked me if I thought this definition of the word still applied.

I'm not really sure.

I know around GenoLogics, if someone says "that's such a hack" they aren't usually delivering a compliment. I don't think GenoLogics is unique in this definition. However, we also hold Hack Days, and these are considered positive things.

Is it positive or negative to say "I'm just gonna' hack on this problem for a while"?

What about "I hacked a solution out in a few hours last night"?

Or "This code is a glorious hack"?

I'm honestly not sure there's a single working definition right now. Do new programmers aspire to be "great hackers"?

What do you think? Does being called a hacker, or having your coding skills referred to as hacking, make you feel like you are being complimented or derided?

The New IT is Anthropology

2008-04-01T17:23:00.005-07:00

Fascinating interview over at Fast Company. Tom Austin from Gartner Research talks about how IT departments should be more focused on cultural and social issues than on technological ones.

This reminds me of the conversation that has been bubbling in software development for the past decade (at least) about how engineers shouldn't design software experiences. In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper makes a good case that software developers have the wrong motivations to allow them to design excellent user experiences.

I wonder if traditional IT experts are starting to face similar problems. As IT moves from being about the technology to being about enabling employee experiences, we may see a growing need for social-design skills in every company's IT arsenal.

Lawn mowing and Snowmobiles

2008-03-30T10:58:00.002-07:00

Another great reason to live and work in Victoria.

Two days ago I was mowing my lawn to mark the start of another Spring. Yesterday I took my two oldest children on a one-hour drive up to the snow line at the Juan de Fuca ridge. (It's amazing what a difference 600m of altitude can make.) We met a friend there and spent a few hours messing around with his snowmobile.

We had a great time riding a sled and snowboarding behind the snowmobile. Being pulled uphill on a snowboard is great fun - especially with all the bumps.

We fired up the camp stove, made hot chocolate, went snow-shoeing, and enjoyed the alternations between sun and falling snow.

After a couple hours we piled everyone back onto the snowmobile (or the sled behind it) and my daughter drove us all back down to the cars.

It's days like this when I realize how awesome it is to live in Victoria.

GenoPalooza 2008 Planning Underway

2008-03-30T09:18:00.003-07:00

We've started planning for GenoPalooza 2008. We're still in the early stages, but we have a theme and a few potential venues. So far, we are considering Royal Roads University and Bear Mountain (two incredible examples of why living in Victoria is so terrific).

More details as they become available.

Are you a Java Genius?

2008-03-26T09:10:00.001-07:00

We always hire fantastic programmers at GenoLogics. We've placed job ads, we're held outrageous recruitment parties, and we've used word of mouth. However, some of the most fun I've had recruiting was the recent act of writing an extraordinary job ad.

If you are a Java Genius, and you'd like to work at GenoLogics, make sure you send us your resume.

GenoPalooza

2007-09-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the second annual GenoLogics' GenoPalooza conference. This is a full-day event for all GenoLogics employees world-wide. (It is planned to coincide nicely with our annual Sales Meeting, so most remote employees are here anyway.)

So what is GenoPalooza? Think of it as a day-long team-building and personal development conference. This year, the day starts at 8am at Dunsmuir Lodge. We begin with a light breakfast and a presentation on corporate culture by GLS's own "culture club". (You know with a name like that, that nothing serious can possibly result.)

The rest of the morning will be dedicated to development workshops on Personal Creativity or "Influencing for Impact". This is followed by lunch the in 5-star restaurant at the lodge.

The afternoon will be a session on using humor to help drive innovation, followed by a workshop on Systems Thinking. Finally, we wrap up with dinner and rooftop volleyball at the Sticky Wicket (home to the world's only rooftop beach volleyball courts).

This is an amazing event. I am constantly surprised at how much investment GenoLogics makes in its employees. It's wonderful to see, and the mood around the office is a constant reminder that this effort is paying dividends.

I won a contest!

2007-08-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

I recently won a contest online. And no, I didn't need to wire $5000 to some unnamed Nigerian bank account in order to claim my winnings. Rather, I won a "My First Computer" contest from a great Mac blog: ThinkMac.Net They were having a contest requesting entrants to write in about their first computer. As my prize, I won a copy the cool Mac application Posterino.

However, I'm not creating this blog entry to brag about my good fortune. I just wanted to share my winning entry:

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX-81. I still remember sitting in front of that thing with a small 9" black and white television punching away on that nasty touch-sensitive keys. My parents noticed how much I was doing with it and helped me spring for a 16KB memory module to hang off the back. Everything would be great unless you moved it too much - then the module would wiggle, the connections would get loose, and the whole system would reboot. A bit of velcro and tape went a long way to fixing that problem.

I remember the first day I wrote:

10 print "Hello "
20 goto 10

And watched the whole screen fill up with words scrolling upwards. I remember being mesmerized by how I could vary the number of spaces after the word and get different patterns of text scrolling up the screen (I was eleven - my simple fascination can probably be forgiven).

It wasn't long before I added an old tape player so I could save and load files. The first time I learned that I could actually purchase software for this machine was mind-expanding! I remember going to the house of a complete stranger, with my Dad in tow, and purchasing cassette tape copies (I can't even remember if they were pirated or not) of a flight simulator and a game called "Mazogs". That's when I knew I had to get into computers myself.

I thank that crazy little machine for eventually landing me with a Masters degree in Computer Science and a life-long passion for software. It lead me through a long sequence of machines: Atari 800, Osborne, Atari ST, Mac Plus, Mac LC, and on and on the list went. A couple years ago I saw an ZX-81 sitting on the shelf of one of my grad supervisors at school. She and I started talking about that machine and learned that we shared a similar set of stories and passions about it. Needless to say, I couldn't get her to part with it for me.

Rotary dial mystery

2007-08-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

On Saturday afternoon we took our family to Sidney for a little sightseeing. The town of Sidney is famous for all its great book stores, but it also has some terrific antique shops.

The first antique shop we wandered into had a section with a number of old radios and toys. Scattered among these treasures was an old avocado green, melamine plastic, rotary telephone.

I picked it up to show it to Deanna, remembering a phone just like it in my home growing up. My daughter wandered over and went all wide-eyed at the sight. "How does that work?!"

I suddenly felt much older than I deserve to feel.

I showed her how to rotate the dial, let it go, wait while it counted down, and then do it again. She tried it a couple times and actually thought it was pretty funny.

I wonder how many years it will take before children look at wired land-line telephones, or any sort, and ask "how does that work?"

Planning Poker

2007-08-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share with you an idea that has been extremely successful for us at GenoLogics over the past couple months. A few months ago I finished reading Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and PlanningIn this terrific book Cohn describes an estimating technique named "Planning Poker". Either this idea is older than I know, or it has really started catching on quickly, because I've begun seeing it in many other places. There's even an online tool to support its use with distributed teams.

So what is Planning Poker? Basically, it's a light-weight, loosely structured technique for group estimating. It draws on historical experience, group knowledge, and some very low-tech tools to keep the process moving.

In Cohn's book he introduces the concept as a tool to help estimate user stories. We have used it for that at GLS. However, we have taken the process a step beyond that and have begun using it to estimate all manner of issues, many larger than user stories.

In a nutshell, here's how it works at GLS.

A moderator (usually from Project Management) creates a list of items to be estimated. The more detail this person has ahead of time, the better.
The estimators (usually a group of five to seven people) sit down in a board room with their planning poker cards in hand (more on that in a minute).
An important note about the composition of these groups: it's best to have a broad representation of interests. We always have one or two people from QA, at least one of our Tech Leads, a couple developers who are familiar with the area being estimated, a member from Product Management (often the person who owns these requirements), and often someone from our Customer Service team. This is critical to make sure the estimates don't leave anything out.
The moderator reads out the description of the item being estimated. "The user should be able to search all experimental data using regular expressions" (or something like that).
A conversation ensues in which everyone asks for clarification, extra details where required, potential impacts to other features, documentation needs, testing implications, etc. For most things, this usually takes only a couple minutes. For extremely complex issues, this has taken us as long as twenty minutes.
The moderator then asks everyone to select their estimate using their cards. These cards contains the numbers 1,2,3,5,8,13 (a Fibonacci sequence). On the count of three, everyone shows their cards at the same time.
When estimating user-stories, these numbers represent "story points" and are relative sizes compared to other user stories completed in the past. When we use this technique to estimate larger items (when we're doing roadmap planning), we use these numbers to represent man-weeks of effort. When doing man-week estimates, the team is required to factor in design, coding, testing, regression and documentation into their totals.
The moderator then asks the estimators who held up the lowest number and the highest number (if necessary) to explain to the rest of the group the reasons for their choice. This step is critical to the whole process. It provides a way for those with divergent opinions to express what they are thinking and triggers additional questions among the group.
After a couple minutes of additional discussion, the moderator asks everyone to select their estimates again. On the count of three all cards are shown. If there is still significant disagreement at this point, the process returns to step 8. Often however, the estimates have nearly converged by the second round, and those that disagree will usually express that the majority view is acceptable to them.
Write the estimate down and go on to the next item.

Following this process we have estimated 25+ complex and significant items in under four hours. Previously those estimates would have been done by a small group of 1 or 2 developers, probably would have taken longer, and certainly would have glossed over or completely forgotten important aspects of each issue.

If you find yourself or your group struggling with estimating I strong suggest giving this method a try. It has worked wonderfully for us and I regularly hear our developers and Product Management people speaking in glowing terms about it. Perhaps the best part is that developers no longer dread estimating meetings because they moving quickly, they provide clear value, and to a degree they are even fun.

Hack Day Finally Gets Some Press

2007-07-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

It took a few weeks, but the Globe and Mail reporters that were hanging around our Hack Day have finally posted their story. There is also a video available for your viewing pleasure.

My favorite quote from the article is:

“Believe me, Canada is low on creativity and innovation,” he said. “Our management practices are bottom of the list.”

He cited a Conference Board of Canada report last month that essentially branded Canada as the “land of mediocrity in business.”

I totally agree. I have been reading Alvin and Heidi Toffler's new book Revolutionary Wealthand it has really got me thinking about this. There's a lot of change coming, and I'm worried that much of Canada won't be ready for it.

Klaxons

2007-07-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

I know this isn't software development related, at least not directly. Actually, I always listen to music when I'm doing the business of software development, so I guess it counts.

If you haven't checked out the new Klaxonsalbum, you need to. While I listen to everything under the sun, I am always looking for music that "challenges" me as a listener. Bands like The Flaming Lips, Beck and Bjork have always been among my favorites because their sounds are complex and intriguing. The Klaxons are a great new addition to my favorites list.

How agile is your Agile?

2007-06-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

Agile development provides tools for dealing with the constantly changing environment in which software is often developed. When used properly these tools do a wonderful job of helping people cope with change. But what about your Agile process itself? What if it needs to change?

At GenoLogics we have been using variations on Agile development for almost a year. In that time we've changed numerous things about our process.

So what is our most recent change? Currently we track all our iteration tasks using Jira, our web-based issue tracking tool. Starting next week one of our iteration teams is going to start tracking their work using 3x5 paper cards. Why the low-tech experiment? We are counting on the human factor; people relate better to things they can see and touch. It is expected that developers who can physically see all the outstanding task cards, and who can take a physical task card to their desk and stick it up on the wall, will have a better sense of their progress.

The specifics of our change aren't the most important thing however. The important thing is that, as a development team, everyone is interested and willing to try something new and see how it works. Even when you think you've got everything figured out, changes in your market, or your staffing levels, or your total experience, will make regular change critical to growing your organization.

What can you change in your process? What will you measure so you can tell if it helped?

Can Agile development increase worker satisfaction?

2007-06-23T12:32:00.001-07:00

The May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) has an article by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer titled "Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance". At first it sounded like it was going to be a little soft and fuzzy. However, as I read (listened actually, I fell in love with Audible years ago and have never looked back) I heard the authors summarize something I have been thinking a lot about lately: the subject of work satisfaction.

Recently the HR team at GenoLogics completed a thorough employee survey. They also spent some time with a focus group of developers asking more detailed questions around our hiring and retention practices. One of the themes that come from all this work was that nearly 50% of the satisfaction our employees receive at work comes from the work itself: doing work they are proud of, feeling like their work matters, having good tools for work, etc.

It is no surprise then to read in Amabile and Kramer's article that researchers have found the same thing with a much larger group. Most interesting, the article was focused on what a Manager can do to help increase the performance of their employees.

There are the (hopefully) obvious things around employee recognition, fair treatment, consistent guidance, etc. However, what surprised the authors was how clear it was that employees need to feel that their work is valuable. In hindsight, this shouldn't be so unexpected. I can't imagine being satisfied with a job where the environment was incredible, everybody loved me and we had lots of fun, but all the work we performed was entirely useless.

Nevertheless, when you sit down and ask the question in a vacuum, as did the HBR researchers or our HR team, the answer isn't as obvious.

So what did Amabile and Kramer teach me about Software Development? They indicated that the most powerful action a manager can undertake to improve business performance is to provide clear goals for employees and to share your own explanation of why those goals are valuable.

"Hold on!" I thought. One of the things I like best about Agile development, and Scrum in particular, is the idea of task lists and burndown charts. Couple those tools with the way developers are closer to the customer in most Agile methods, and you get an almost perfect solution to the problems identified in HBR.

When your developers are involved in customer discovery and work together to help design solutions, they have an almost automatic understanding of the value of their work. When they get together to create user-stories, tasks lists, and commit to a set of work for each iteration, they are setting clear goals for themselves.

By following Scrum principles, a software development team automatically provides solutions to the greatest issue identified in the HBR article. Anyone who has used Scrum, and given it a real chance, usually finds that they prefer it. Now Amabile and Kramer have helped us learn why.

Hack Day Summary

2007-06-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Hack Day, by all accounts, was the best one yet. The concept is rare enough that we had the local newspaper and TV cameras in the office to capture the event.

To make the day memorable, GenoLogics pulled out all the stops. There were plates of snacks and candy, along with coolers full of gatorade, pop and energy drinks scattered around the office. At lunch there was more pizza than we could eat. Finally, when it was all over, everyone who produced a hack was entered into a draw for a bunch of great, and geeky, prizes. (Remote control helicopters, battle tanks, USB drink coolers and loads of other stuff from Think Geek.)

So what was hacked? I'll try and list them all, but forgive me if I leave a few out:

Melanie showed an iTunes style browser interface wedded into Geneus's main data display pane.
Tony showed an SVG hack that he is working on for his Master's degree.
Jianping expanded the UI in Proteus to allow for extensive customization of user icons.
Ryan showed a joke set of splash screens for an upcoming product we're working on.
Paul and Sameer used Lego Mindstorms and a pair of laptops to create a remote-controlled robotic webcam. Using a web interface from Boston, one of our remote employees could drive the robot-laptop around the office moving his virtual eyes and face any place he liked.
I showed a rapidly configured Asterisk server running inside a VMWare image, with full SIP trunking to the PSTN and the Gizmo project. I also showed a WebDAV extension to our internal Wiki that allows everyone to store files in the Wiki instead of traditional file shares.
Mark helped my Asterisk hack by modifying VMWare Server to run a virtual machine created on VMWare Fusion on my Mac (these two product are not yet officially compatible).
Michael and Tyler showed a cool hack that generates live graphs of our sales pipeline over time.
Adam hacked his iPod and iTunes to properly sync play-counts and produced an RSS feed of all his recently played music, along with a great web-portal to display it all.
Shahriar demonstrated a cool USB-key + iPod hack that showed Proteus running on any computer by booting from the USB-key and running a VMWare image from the iPod.
Dylan showed a Bit-Torrent searching engine that automatically finds items you have placed in a To-Do list at Remember-The-Milk and sends notifications via RSS and SMS.
Pandora and Cassandra showed a new context-sensitive help engine they integrated into our Proteus (PDF) desktop client.
Kelly, who was working remotely from Vancouver, used Skype video to show us how he hacked his Wii-mote to be a wireless mouse on his Mac.

It was an incredible collection of amazing ideas, all hacked together in under eight hours. The best part of Hack Day is how it encouraged everyone to break out of our normal patterns and experiment with new ideas and solutions.

Any software manager who is reading this post should take note of the number of people who voluntarily selected hacks that enhanced our existing products or improved our regular business operations. I'm convinced that Hack Day generates more value for GenoLogics than any regular work day does. If you haven't tried it with your group, I strongly suggest you give it a shot.

Even if you don't create software, you can have a Hack Day. We have people in our sales, marketing and customer support groups participate in Hack Day all the time.

How can you encourage Hack Day where you work?

(updated 25 June 2007. Added Shahriar's hack)

Hack Day!

2007-06-21T20:27:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is GenoLogic's second Hack Day of 2007. I'm particularly excited because my wife was getting pins in her wrist last Hack Day, and I was providing moral support. (She broke her arm during our annual snowboard trip this year. I'm thinking it might not be so annual anymore.)

Because I couldn't attend the last one, this will be my first Hack Day at GenoLogics. I've got a couple ideas for my hack, but I'm still working out the details. I'll be sure to post the specifics once all the dust settles.

I hear the local media is showing up this time. While Hack Day might not be unique to us, I believe we're the only place in Victoria that does this, and it's starting to attract a lot of attention.

Want to work at a place that offers quarterly Hack Days, incredible benefits, and an awesome environment? Check out our careers page for more details.

Agile Development

2007-06-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

I know it's a pretty hot buzzword these days, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a lot of good thinking behind Agile Development. At GenoLogics we are working at applying these principles to change how we develop software.

Before I go any further I need to state that I'm not the person who brought Agile Development to GenoLogics; the transition away from traditional waterfall development was happening before I arrived. However, as Software Development Manager, and as a believer in Agile Development, I've taken it upon myself to continue what was started.

So what are we doing at GenoLogics? I plan to answer that question over the next few weeks as I document our process, the changes we've undergone, and the challenges we still face. Stay tuned.

Facebook - mistake or master stroke?

2007-05-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

I just heard that Facebook is going to open up a public API on Thursday. The claim it's to create some of the "flexibility" offered to MySpace users.

All I can say is, I hope it doesn't also create all of the nasty ugliness offered to MySpace users. There isn't a site on the Internet as hopelessly ugly as MySpace.

I just started using Facebook, and I'm enjoying it. But if it starts looking like MySpace, I won't hesitate to drop it in a heartbeat.

MS Entourage and Google Desktop

2007-05-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

I'm using my Mac for everything now. I'm also being forced to use Entourage, along with an Exchange server, for all my work Email. As nice a tool as Entourage is (I certainly like it better than Outlook), it still pales in comparison to the power of Gmail. What to do?

I tried forwarding all my Email to Gmail like I did at my last job. That played havoc with our internal mailling lists and calendaring system. But at least it got me what I liked best: easy archiving and searching. The joy of Gmail is that, because it has no folders, you can never struggle with the question of "which folder should I file this message under?" No confusion about what to do when a message might belong equally in two places at once. Just archive it all and search for it later. Once you get over the mental hurdle of trusting the search engine, much of the pain and mental confusion of dealing with Email simply goes away.

That's what I loved about Gmail.

So how could I create the Gmail experience inside Entourage? I knew that Apple's new Spotlight technology was capable of searching Entourage Email. The problem was that I was once again using an Email client that supported hierarchic folders and I was trying to use them. Big mistake. I needed to remember the lessons taught by Gmail.

First I downloaded and installed Google Desktop. This integrates with Spotlight's searching of Entourage Email, plus it makes a few more things accessible than Spotlight alone. (However, I have noticed that Spotlight still finds some documents - though not Emails - better than Google Desktop can.)

Second, I create a folder in Entourage called "Archive" and stored it on my local disk. It's important that this folder NOT be on the Exchange server, because I planned on shamelessly sticking just about everything into it.

Third, I created an Entourage AppleScript that would move all selected messages into this archive folder. Once in that folder, I could simply forget about them like under Gmail and use Google Desktop to find them when they were needed.

The AppleScript I used was a simple one:

on run
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
set selectedMessages to current messages
set destFolder to folder "archive"

if selectedMessages is {} then
display dialog "Please select a message first" with icon 1
return
end if

repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages
move theMessage to destFolder
end repeat
end tell
end run

So long as you have a folder named "Archive" on your local computer, it all works.

Now I'm using Entourage with my exchange server while still avoiding the challenge of figuring out where to file (or find) all my Email. If I need something, I just press the Command key twice and use the same search phrases I know from Gmail.

It's almost the best of both worlds. The only problem now is that my archived mail isn't available if I'm at a web-browser in the local library or if I'm using my Treo instead of my Mac. But it's sure a step forward.

Back to the Mac

2007-05-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

My first Mac was a Mac Plus in 1988. I worked through a series of machines include the MacSE, SE/30, IIfx, II-lc, Powerbook Duo 230, and finally a PowerMac G3. That was my last Mac and I kept it running until 2003. (My Mom kept it running for another three years after that.)

Sadly, in 2003 I needed a new machine, I had a job that required me to use Windows, and I was feeling cheap. So I bought a run-of-the-mill Pentium 4 machine and made the leap to Windows and Linux exclusively for the last four years.

When I began my new job back in March of this year I specifically requested a MacBook Pro. Fortunately, GenoLogics is open-minded enough that they have a bit of everything: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac. I've been using this new Mac to the exclusion of all else ever since. It is so wonderful to be back with a Mac.

The great news is, with the Intel based machines, if I really need Windows I just fire up Parallels and I'm good to so. Easy.

Facebook

2007-05-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

I know I'm really late to the party on this one, but I just created my first Facebook account.

I've known about the service since its inception, but I just didn't see how it was worth investing any time in. What changed? Well, now that hundreds of people I know have Facebook accounts it's suddenly become worthwhile.

I must say, Facebook is so much cleaner and more pleasant than all the ugly pages over at MySpace. I hate looking at Myspace pages. Facebook is much leaner and to the point.

I know there are other, newer, services out there, but the network-effects have kicked in at Facebook and finally made it a useful tool for me.

I've already reestablished contact with three friends who I hadn't spoke to for years. That alone makes it worth the time I've invested.

Two Months at GLS

2007-05-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

I've been working at GenoLogics for a bit over two months now. It's been a real learning experience. For the first few weeks I was drinking from the fire-hose as I scrambled to learn everything about the industry, the culture, the people, the process and a million other things. I have learned what an aloquat is, the difference between Genotyping and Gene-expression, what a MALDI mass-spec does, and the difference between using a Gel and LC for protein separation. There's still tons to learn, but at least I've got the basics covered.

What do I like about working at GLS?

The culture. There is a strong desire to do the right thing, to make a significant difference in the world, and to see everyone grow and improve.
Professional education. GLS invests significant time and money in helping people learn. We have a book club, regular external training sessions, a formal budget for professional development, and the annual Genopalooza conference.
Agility. Important decisions can, and are, made quickly and decisively.
The industry. I had almost no exposure to biological science outside of marrying a Micro-biologist. I love what I get to learn, and I love having a need to learn it.
Success. While GLS isn't yet profitable, we have dozens of very happy customers and lots of new successes each quarter. Having come from a previous job where there was very little success in nine years, having growing revenues is an awesome experience.

Right now my biggest efforts are in improving the effectiveness of our development and QA groups, and in helping get a repeatable process in place for requirements management. Everyone is very cooperative and eager to see things change - which has significantly eased the challenge of moving into this new position.

The fabrication divide and rogue economists

2007-02-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

This post will take a long time for you to read. About 40 minutes in fact. Why? Because I want you to take the first 18 minutes and watch a presentation from Bjorn Lomborg. He is commonly known in the media as the "Skeptical Environmentalist". His talk at TED, in 2005 introduced his ideas about how money could best be spent if our goal was to do the most good. So, sit back and watch Bjorn's presentation first.

OK, now that you're thinking about ways that financial aid might best be spent to help the world, you should watch a presentation from Neil Gershenfeld from MIT. He speaks about the world of micro-fabrication, and how the stages beyond "going digital" will involve the ability for people to manufacture their own goods. This concept is truly mind-expanding. Please take another 18 minutes to watch Neil's presentation - I promise it will be worth it.

All done? Great.

Now imagine...what if the economists Bjorn got together had known about the kind of bottom-up manufacturing and problem solving that Neil's "Fab Labs" are creating? What if instead of investing money providing $100 laptops to third-world children, we invested money in giving them access to Fab Labs, micro-investment banking, and training in basic business operations? Remember, Bjorn's analysis listed Free-Trade as one of the most valuable ways of spending aid money. Imagine what might have been concluded if Bjorn's group knew about the grass roots success of micro-manufacturing?

Goodbye to VMI

2007-02-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

For nearly nine years I have been working at Voice Mobility. I've done almost everything there, from coding to system-architecture and from product management to CTO. It's been a wonderful chance to learn tons of new things and to work with some of the greatest business people, engineers and software developers in British Columbia. VMI has given me the chance to attend numerous industry conferences, to speak at VON twice, to travel to Toronto, Denver, Boston, Kansas City, San Diego, Seattle and many points in between. While at VMI I completed my Masters Degree in Computer Science, we added two children to our family, we bought our first home, and experiences dozens of other firsts. It has truly been a wonderful time in my life.

However, like all things, we sometimes need a change to help us grow. For me, that change began in December as I started looking at a job posting with a company called Genologics.

I'll spare you the details, but after nearly 12 separate interviews (we were both very thorough) I have accepted a position as the Software Development Manager at Genologics Life Sciences Software.

I will be managing a team of about 20 developers. I know some of the people there already, and I have enormous respect for them. I've heard many great things about the company, and I've been very impressed with their CEO, their HR director, and their general corporate philosophy. I am also excited about the opportunity to immerse myself in the domain of Life Sciences instead of Telecom. After nine years, I'm no longer excited when I read about IMS, VoIP, Mobile-convergence, and all the other fascinating things going on in the communications space. If I can't get excited by what's happening in Telecom today, it's clearly time to move on.

I'll miss VMI; most especially the great people. But this is an excellent opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone and do something new.

The iPhone is NOT the WiiPhone

2007-01-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I was talking about how I felt the Wii pointed the way to a possible technology shift to simplicity. Some readers have pointed to the iPhone as a possible answer to this challenge. I disagree.

This post from Martin Geddes summarizes the problems nicely. When using the Wii, it's easy to see how Nintendo took the same complex feature we were familiar with (playing video games) and made it drastically simpler. Apple had the opportunity to take the same features we knew (using a phone) and make them simpler, but they didn't. They just made them prettier.

Adding a multi-touch screen does NOT make the basic features of telephony simpler. Just like the iPod didn't make using an MP3 player simpler. What made the iPod simpler was the whole package which includes iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Without iTunes and the music store, I believe the iPod wouldn't be the MP3 winner today. In fact, the entire Mp3 player market might have never even materialized.

So, what can we learn from this? I'm not entirely certain. But a few key points are clear.

First, the interface change from joysticks to motion-control, HAS made the Wii easier to use. So an interface alone, can make a difference. But that interface needs to be very well conceived.

Second, the iPod interface isn't what made the iPod succeed. It was the entire package, including iTunes.

Third, the iPhone hasn't made using a phone simpler. Just prettier.

It seems that Apple could have taken two possible approaches to making the iPhone a better device. The Wii approach, where they radically rethought the interface. Or the iPod approach, where they improved the experience by providing all the missing pieces.

What do you think? Is there a phone interface that is radical enough to be Wii-worthy? Or is there a more full experience that Apple could have included to make the iPhone significantly better than the competition?

The Wii and Telephony

2007-01-01T14:46:00.000-08:00

My son bought a Nintendo Wii a couple days after they were released back in November. The whole family has been having a blast with it. I'm convinced that Nintendo's decision to bundle Wii Sports with the console was a marketing master-stroke.

Naturally the Wii came with us when we visited the Grandparents for Christmas.

I was pretty certain the Wii was a brilliant move on Nintendo's part. It simplified gaming and I was confident it would lead to a larger market for Nintendo some day. Turns out that I seriously underestimated Nintendo's genius.

Picture the following: it's Christmas Eve at Grandma's house. The Wii has been plugged into the 42" TV in the family room. Gathered around the Wii are my sister-in-law, her husband, one of my wife's cousins, her husband, my wife, and Grandma. Everyone is playing bowling on the Wii and having a blast doing it. People who would NEVER play video games are playing the Wii and loving it. Both Grandma and our cousin said the will be buying their own.

Yesterday I was talking to some friends at church. One woman who purchased a Wii for her kids for Christmas, told me how her 64-year-old sister was playing Golf on the Wii. Another family, who haven't bought a video game system since the old Game Cube, actually stood in line for three days in order to pick up a Wii for their kids.

Something significant is happening here. The Wii is re-painting the video-game market in its own image.

So what does all this have to do with Telephony?

I know dozens of people who don't own mobile phones. In fact, many of them are the same people who don't own video-game consoles. Why haven't they owned consoles before, but now they love the Wii? Becuase it's EASY; just a couple of buttons and wave the controller around.

Why don't these people own mobile phones? For the same reason they never bought consoles. Take a look at the average mobile phone. It has contact lists, SMS, MMS, Video, IM, a camera, an MP3 player, to-do lists and a calendar, and a user interface that boggles the mind.

Where is the mobile phone that is as simple and compelling as the Wii?