Entries from August 2005 ↓

A quotation from Paypal founder Max Levchin in an otherwise typical wrong-footed article at I, Cringely :

“What you want to do,” he said, “is listen to your customers and bring out every two weeks improved versions that would each take your competitor two months to complete. That’s when you are on a rocket—they can’t keep up so they can’t compete. They lose hope and pretty soon you have the market pretty much to yourself.”

Cringely goes on to say that developing at that pace isn’t sustainable.

He’s wrong here – what becomes increasingly hard to sustain isn’t development pace but rather corporate risk-taking. At some point, most companies switch from growth to consolidation in the same way as most teenagers turn into responsible adults.

Occasionally companies have mid-life crises – I think Microsoft’s struggling with this phase right now – longing to be the long-haired 50-something who rides a motorbike to work. Everyone else knows it’s just a phase and that he’s in fact scared to death.

Anyway, I for one applaud the teenager dot-com companies lurking on the street corners of web, drinking cider and terrorizing passing geriatrics. Please, Mr. Google, can I join your gang?

In the latest installment of the Google, MSN and Yahoo macho stand-off, Google has added IM capability. At first I groaned at this – another IM identity, another IM client, another closed protocol – my business card has no room left for more cryptic letters.

But I was wrong – it seems Google is truly committed to Open Communications – using XMPP and planning to develop SIP.

This makes Google less evil than the other two, and more far-sighted.

It still seems amazing to me that I can telephone anyone, anywhere in the world using technology 50 years old but I can only IM people who use the same service as me – bonkers. What’s even wierder is that the other two portals seem to like it like that. So, well done Google – now, if you could just fix your once-excellent search engine….

An extremely confused article in the SDTimes today.

What they get right is that a “build bottleneck” is a common feature of large agile projects and one of the big challenges in scaling Agile.

“Streamlining the build process is a quality-of-life issue for developers.” Absolutely right, but as importantly a slow build process lengthens quality feedback loops and reduces code quality.

The article goes on to say that the open source tools just aren’t up to the commercial tools. Absolute balderdash, as our company chairman might say. Anyone, like myself, whose tried the multi-thousand pound commercial development platforms and given them up for ant, cruise control and junit knows that this is nonsense and that the real problem is that development teams just don’t devote as much time to build as to features.

The big laugh though comes from a technologist recommending Visual SourceSafe – “But if you’re going to pay for anything, pay for good source control”. Hmm. I guess it’s better than nothing, but not by much.

My ongoing rant about meetings echoed on to-done.com

A good tip, I thought: “Set a time limit. Then think about cutting it in half. If you think you want an hour meeting, try a half-an-hour. For some reason people think that an hour is “standard duration” for a meeting.” I don’t know about you, but I can hardly concentrate for more than twenty minutes.

I’m fed of hearing people gripe that Open Source is unattractive to companies because there’s no support contract attached.

Yesterday I had a problem with an open source package manager we use called DarwinPorts. One of the packages, no matter how much I fiddled with it, wouldn’t install.

I posted a message to the mailing list at 2:58pm, and by 4pm I had received an email from the maintainer of the package to tell me that it was a genuine problem, and that it had now been fixed.

All for the princely sum of 0p and heartfelt thanks to Daniel Luke who fixed the problem.

How many commercial closed-source companies out there can claim this level of support?

We’ve all had days like this: Hullo, Technical Support

Wouldn’t it be great if we painted every wall?

Good piece from Paul Graham that connects amateurish enthusiasm with productivity, start-ups and open source software.

Choice quotes:

“At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.”

“Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces I’ve described. They’ve tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup. They even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.”

“Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects, and instead of trying to approximate the value of what they create, give them the actual market value? Impossible? That is in fact what venture capitalists do.”

“One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many still make you register to read stories. I have yet to find a blog so stupid they tried that.”

And my favourite:

“The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.”