Read at Joe’s

I just got through watching this video of Jason Fried that was recorded earlier this week in Boston. It’s the long-form, illustrated-with-slides version of the extemporaneous talk he did for RI Nexus this past Wednesday in Providence. I highly recommend this to anyone involved in software development.

Listening to his list of specific dos and don’ts in more detail just now made me realize that there’s one overarching philosophical tenet that guides all the details and that is the following.

Run your business and build your product for yourself, not for investors or shareholders or analysts or “big” customers. Run your business to sustain your own life-style and your own integrity. Build things you believe in, not what some purchasing manager put in an RFP.

Investors want you to grow without bounds. That makes you put in crap you don’t want. Salesmen want you to put in a useless feature so they can get a big sale. Big customers want you to put in things only they want. While some of these forces may have some benefits, in the long run, they only push you to do things that dilute or muddy up the product with noise. Truly great products are simple, coherent, easy to understand and perform quickly and reliably.

For me, this means satisfying the artist, artisan and craftsman in myself, not somebody who makes money off of what I do. That is where great works come from; not from a balance sheet, an enhancements list, a specification or god knows, Microsoft Project.

Tags: development, philosophy

Many thanks go out to Jack Templin and RINexus for bringing Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals to Providence last night. Jason spoke on many aspects of his success and what got him there, and answered a lot of questions, even mine!

What really impressed me about Jason’s story was that he became a success doing things the way I’ve always thought they should be done. And more to the point, exactly the opposite of the way traditional management tells you it should and must be done. Some examples from his talk.

1. Don’t get venture money. Bootstrap your idea in your spare time keeping your day job. You don’t want anyone telling you what to do who doesn’t share your passion for what you’re doing.
2. Don’t have a board of directors. What do they know about what you’re trying to do?
3. Don’t write specs, write code. You can’t tell whether something is good or bad from a spec, only from working code. Do it quick. If it’s no good, throw it away and move on. People in organizations are dreadfully afraid of making a mistake. Don’t worry about it, just do it.
4. Don’t keep an enhancement or bug list. Trust your gut to do what’s most important. When you keep hearing the same thing from people you know and trust, go ahead and do something about it.
5. Try to do everything in two week increments. That is, don’t let people get bored doing the project. They do their best work when they’re excited about the outcome.
6. Don’t plan too much. My question to Jason was about whether or not his small 12 person operation would scale up. He said, “I don’t know and I don’t care. We’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
7. Don’t hire any marketing people. Your customers are your best marketing dept.
8. Trust your employees. 37 signals gives each of their employees an unlimited charge card, to spend on whatever they want, however much they want. The company bought one employee flying lessons. Not because it would be a usable skill, but because it would make him a more happy and well-rounded employee. In their experience employees do not abuse the charge privilege, but use it sparingly, knowing that it comes of the bottom line.
9. Don’t spend money on an office. Keep employees in their own homes. That’s where they’re most productive. In an office it’s too easy to be interrupted and too easy to call a meeting. Meetings are productivity killers.
10. Charge money for your product from Day One. This is a complement to the Don’t take money from VCs rule. Nothing succeeds like revenue. If you have something worth paying for, people will pay for it. If it can’t sustain itself, find something else to do.

I’m sure there were more, but those are the ones that stuck with me. As a survivor of 35+ years in the software development business, I can personally attest to the practicality of these guidelines. I have seen the opposite fail miserably for my whole career, but every once in a while, I managed to become part of something that didn’t obey the rules, and those were the memorable successes.

Don’t let the management, marketing and financial suits tell you any different. Do what you know is right. If it doesn’t work, learn from the experience and don’t make the same mistake again. But please, don’t think you can ever get it right without trial and error. It’s so obvious it’s painful, but there are still legions of project and product and people managers who wouldn’t have jobs if not for torturing you with requirements statements, schedules and bug reports.

And one thing that he swears will never be added to BaseCamp, their project management tool: Gantt Charts. Hurray!!

Tags: development, entrepreneurship, Jason Fried, RINexus

This morning, I read an excellent blog post entitled “A Failure of Ideas, not Execution”, by Hank Williams, which was copied on the nextNY blog. It’s about the failure of most Web 2.0 companies to be acquired because they don’t have any strategy for making money from their ideas. One particular aspect of these failures is a bugaboo of mine, so I thought I’d follow up. Williams writes the following.

The idea that the raft of social media companies with no revenue model was going to somehow “figure revenue out later” after building up large audiences of free users has, I think been debunked.

I couldn’t agree more. Just having users is no measure of potential profitability, especially if you have nothing but advertising as a way to generate revenue. A database of users is not worth very much, in my opinion, even as a data asset. But investors continue to use this as a metric for valuation. Indeed, it seems to have become one of the accepted conventions of startup business. Buy why? I think it’s because, in the absence of real revenue, there aren’t any other ways to measure a web 2.0, social media startup. And, in addition, you have to have made those users go through a tedious registration process. It’s as though investors won’t count a user unless you made them go through some pain to register.

This is nonsensical. It’s like setting up a bricks and mortar retail store where you give things away instead of charging for them, but only letting people in the door if they sign your guest book. Well, what does that prove? That they value what you’re giving away? That you somehow “own” them now?

The theory, as it was explained to me once, is that you can expect to be able to convert some small percentage of free users into paying users. But if that’s the case, why make it difficult for them to sample your wares? Why not get as many in the door as possible? Why not make it as easy as possible? There is a way to do this, yet still give them an identity on your site. It’s called OpenID, an open, single-sign on technology for authenticating users and creating unique records for them on your site. Basically, it lets you use the same user identification (a URL like http://joecascio.net) and password for every site that accepts it. It’s very similar in concept to a general credit card like Visa or MasterCard. Instead of having a separate credit account with each merchant, you have one account with the credit card company and use that same account ID (the credit card number) everywhere you shop.

Someday, I hope Web 2.0 companies and more importantly, their investors, realize that it’s more important to get people in the door and shopping than getting them to sign your guest book. This goes hand-in-hand with Hank’s point that you have to give them something worth paying for.

I’ve been tweeting this weekend about making chili. I love chili and over a lot of years, I’ve refined my recipe to the point where it’s easy to make and tastes great. When I started out making chili, I experimented with different recipes and ingredients. I threw everything but the kitchen sink into it, usually to no good end. After a while, I realized that chili recipes are sort of like Japanese gardens. They’re not complete if there is something you can still take out.

My recipe tends to be more old school, and includes no tomatoes, only meat, onions, chili peppers, jalapenos, a bit of sweet pepper and spices. Here it is:

Joe’s Exothermic Chili

Serves approx. 8

Ingredients

• 2 lbs. stew beef
• 1 lb. hot Italian sausage. I use Perri’s.
• 1 small can diced green chilis
• 1 small can sliced jalapenos
• 1 sweet pepper
• 1 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
• 4 - 6 tbsp chili powder
• 2 tbsp cumin
• Olive oil
• 1 can red kidney beans
• (optional) 2 cloves garlic
• (optional) 1 - 2 tbsp Masa harina (southwest corn flour, NOT corn meal)

Directions:

1. Grind or dice stew beef into small pieces. I use a Cuisinart for this.
2. Remove casings from sausages
3. Mince onions, sweet pepper
4. If you use garlic, mince the cloves
5. Cover bottom of a large sauce pot with a generous amount of olive and heat.
6. When oil is hot, fry garlic until brown, then remove.
7. Add minced onions, sweet pepper and diced green chilis
8. If jalapenos are in vinegar, wash them off with cold water before adding add to pot
9. Cook vegetables until onions are soft
10. Break sausage meat into small pieces and add to pot. Break up as much as possible using cooking spoon.
11. Add minced/diced beef
12. Cover and cook on low heat for at least 45 minutes, stirring often, until fat and juices are generated, making a stew-like mixture. This much meat should generate enough liquid to almost cover the meat and other ingredients
13. Add chili powder and cumin. Broth should turn a dark reddish-brown color.
14. Cover and let simmer, stirring occasionally for at least another hour.
15. Add masa harina slowly to achieve desired thickness.
16. Test for taste, add brown sugar slowly to taste, add more chili or cumin if necessary, or tabasco to desired heat level.
17. Add beans, let simmer until bubbling again.
18. Serve with shredded jack cheese and/or sour cream garnish.

Like any stew-type dish, it really benefits from spending a night in the refrigerator so the flavors blend nicely.

A while back, I posted a video blog entry of my chili-making process. Here it is:

Enjoy!!

Just now, someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to what looks like an interesting article in the Boston Globe’s online site boston.com. So, I click on the link and instead of seeing the story, like I used to, I now get this:

Sigh…. I thought we’d gotten past this foolishness of forcing readers to sign up on your site just to read your content. Now I have to create yet another login ID and password that I have to remember.

If you go to the registration page you find this form:

As you can see, they want lots of personal information about you, including your job and household income. All I can say to you, Globe, is that it’s none of your damned business how much I make or where I work, how old I am or what town I live in. If you want to offer me something additional for putting in this information, then I might consider it. I don’t have to tell you this stuff to read the paper version, do I?

Why do I have to register for Boston.com?
We’re now asking the readers of Boston.com to register for two reasons. We’d like to:

1. Improve your experience on the site by offering content and features tailored to your interests.
2. Target the marketing messages you receive to make them more relevant and deliver a better value for our advertisers

Many newspaper Web sites require registration. Our hope is that our quick and easy registration process will minimize any inconvenience. The best part is that you only need to register once for full access for life.

This just doesn’t wash for me. For 1., using a regular old cookie, they can track what I look at without having me register. Once they do that, they can accomplish #2. If they really want to know where I live and how much I make, they can politely ask and let me say no. They should never force me to do it, though. That’s just making it hard for me to consume their content, and making my experience unpleasant.

I would consider paying for access to the Globe, just like I pay to get a paper copy as long as they didn’t get greedy about it. Maybe charge $1 year or $.10 per visit. That would provide them a revenue stream to offset the marketing information they get from making you register.

Now, let me offer a very reasonable alternative. The open protocol, open source, single sign-on technology for the web is OpenID. In the same way that a general credit card (e.g., MasterCard, Visa, AMEX) lets you avoid having to have a special credit card and account with every store, so OpenID lets you have one (or a small number) of Internet identifiers that can be used wherever OpenID is accepted. the Boston Globe should offer OpenID as an alternative means of authentication and registration. OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com and labs.verisign.com, as well as Yahoo, Flickr, WordPress.com and AOL all provide for demographic information if the user approves it. If the Globe offered OpenID as an alternative to creating yet another login/password (YALP?) and agreed to accept the level of demographic information I authorize through my OpenID provider, I would object far less to registering for the site.

What would really be cool is if I could associate a charge account with my OpenID, and simply by logging in and approving either once or every time I visit, pay the Globe for accessing their content.

And, by the way, Boston Globe, your parent company The New York Times, just attended the OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in New York City. You’ve got no excuse! Get with the program!

Some GM cars have a wireless communication system called OnStar, which lets you communicate with GM service people for roadside assistance, directions, vehicle diagnostics, unlocking doors and other driving and travel type of functions. I was just reading this article from 2004, that talks about all the wonderful things cars will be able to do when they’re equipped with special vehicle-to-vehicle networking. Things like traffic monitoring and safety hazards in the road ahead can certainly be done with special-purpose vehicle-to-vehicle networking.

But why bother? Why not just have a 3G wireless broadband node integrated right into the car? Then, a car could become its own little wi-fi or Bluetooth hotspot. All your wi-fi or Bluetooth devices could connect to the Internet using the car’s 3G node. Wouldn’t it be great for passengers to simply pop open their laptop, PDA, or wi-fi enabled phone in the car and have it just work? And because you’re connecting via IP, you have all the flexibility, reach and power of being on the Internet, not just connected to some proprietary, closed, auto-only network.

Almost anything you can do with a special auto-to-auto network, you can do with an IP network, and in many cases, do a better job with more choices and flexibility than a purpose-built auto network. Think of all the really cool applications you could do with integrated Internet access plus GPS. The car itself becomes a node on the internet. It could talk to its manufacturer’s vehicle support site, keeping track of driving records, trips, gas mileage and checking for service bulletins. This could be integrated with the service records for the car, assuming it is serviced at one of the manufacturer’s dealerships. If properly instrumented, problems could be diagnosed remotely.

And here’s something I’ve always wanted: be able to “talk” to my car’s internal computer system using my laptop. Why not? If the car has a full function little server in it, instead of those special purpose, non-integrable systems, the car’s server could present a web-site you could hit with your laptop through the car’s built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth network. And this could be tied in with service information at the manufacturer’s engineering and service sites. Now when the “Check Engine” light comes on, you could find out in plain English what’s wrong by going to car’s home page.

In terms of traffic and directional information, what could be better than being tied into the most up-to-date maps from a centralized repository, like Google maps? Real-time actual speeds could be forwarded to a central server (one you’d be able to choose, I’d hope) and traffic information would be thus crowd-sourced and redistributed out for rerouting around tie-ups.

Oh, and of course, you’d be able to use IP telephony over the link as well. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to use Skype audio and maybe even video, right from the car? And by using either the GPS time information, or an NTP server on the net, the clock in the car would never be wrong again! And you’d never have to set it for time zones, since it knows where it is at all times. Now that would be a true GeekMobile!

So, there’s today’s brainstorm. I just found out through Twitter that Chrysler is indeed planning something like this for 2009. If you know of any other plans or projects like this, please let me know in the comments.

Tags: 3G, automobile, broadband, IP, networks, onstar, wireless

There’s an old expression in golf, “Every once in a while, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.” It’s usually invoked when an otherwise inept duffer (like myself) makes an incredible golf shot worthy of a pro. This applies to photograpy, too, I think. Sometimes, without realizing it at the time, you just happen to snap a memorable photo; one that captures the essense of a place or a person.

Very early this year, I visited the Boulevard Diner in Worcester, Massachusetts with friends Scott Monty and CC Chapman, both diner aficianados. I am a very old patron of the Boulevard, having gone there after fraternity parties in my college days, 40 years ago. It was great to be back, enjoying the ambience and the sausage sandwiches. I spend some time snapping photos of the place, which should really be a historic landmark. It’s a Worcester Lunch Car diner, originally built in 1936 and has much of its original woodwork and finishings. I happened to catch this view of the counter, the menu board, the waitress in a reflective moment, and the cook, gossiping with a friend.

It may mean more to me because of my college memories, but I think it speaks to a certain essential America; an honest, hard-working city; the nobility of work; the sense of place and heritage you only find in old things. In particular, I love the waitress. She’s proud, straight-backed and comfortable with her cup of coffee, looking out on the world.

Yes, every once in a while, even this blind squirrel finds a nut. I hope you’ll share it with me.

There is renewed interest in trying to construct a microblogging platform using XMPP for the “push” or notification of followers. The Open Birdcage project is aiming to

establish a full environment for an XMPP based microblogging service. Environment means the full stack necessary beginning from protocol and API definitions to server side and client side implementations.

I am hoping that this project will also be able to make a distinction between publishing of content and notifying subscribers of the publishing event. This is a generally useful function that transcends microblogging. It would be a great boon to live-bloggers, news services, live-streaming video or any publishing endeavor where time is a factor.

I’ve written in this space previously about the idea of a personal publishing platform. OpenBirdcage may give us the opportunity to decouple the notions of creating and posting content from the notion of notifying others that the new content is available.

In this decoupled model, you could choose a notification provider separate from your publishing provider, although certainly the two might be offered by the same site. In addition, you could choose multiple notification providers so if one failed, subscribers could simply fall over to one or more backup site.

This model would allow not only microblogs, but any web publisher to very rapidly notify subscribers of new or changed content without having to poll. Your personal identity and/or publishing site would present XRDS records allowing subscribers to discover your notification provider accounts, which could be totally distinct from your publishing provider.

XMPP publish-subscribe plus Atom is well-suited to this model. It would allow small content like microblog posts to be sent right in the notification, while links would be sent for larger content.

Tags: Atom, decoupling, microblogging, notification, publishing, xmpp, XRDS

To all those who wonder what people see in Twitter, I wish I could show you my Twitter stream from yesterday, my birthday. I got so many warm Happy Birthday wishes from my Twitter friends. Too many to count right now. Many from people I’ve never met in person, but with whom I’ve made a friendly relationship on the web. The wonderful thing about Twitter is that people can reach out and publicly wish you a Happy Birthday or Anniversary or whatever no matter where they are.

Thanks, Twitter friends!!

I’ve been having a little conversation on Twitter this morning with a fellow golfer in the UK (@greenfee) about the upcoming Ryder Cup matches, which will be held this year at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, KY on September 16 to 21. To tell you the truth, I’d completely forgotten that the Ryder Cup was this month, until @greenfee mentioned it.

Our US teams have not been faring too well in the last few of these biennial events, and got their hats handed to them in 2006 at the K Club in Ireland, suffering an 18 1/2 to 9 1/2 drubbing at the hands of the GB/IR/Eu team. So, naturally the media hype machine is gearing up for a full-court press to see if Our Boys can salvage their self-respect on our soil in a couple of weeks. The fact that it is on American soil this round only further intensifies the pressure on the US team to win.

And it’s this very pressure that, it seems to me, is responsible for their poor performances of late. But it’s not that the US guys aren’t capable of handling pressure. They stand over 2 foot knee-knockers every week that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and potentially millions in endorsement deals. But that is an individual pressure. It affects them and their families, but doesn’t bring glory or shame upon a nation. That’s pressure!

Some have analyzed this pressure as something the Americans also bring upon themselves by taking the Ryder Cup way too seriously. Not that it isn’t important, but it’s certainly not the End of The World as the press would have us believe. The American teams are way too worried about losing, it seems to me, which is what causes them to clutch so much. They’re all furrowed brows and solemn concentration.

Contrast this with the UK/Euro teams. The night before matches, you’re more likely to find them out drinking together or watching sports or just relaxing. None of these Come To Jesus meetings and bed checks that characterize the Americans. Maybe it’s our long history of puritanical conservatism, but the American teams ought to emulate their opponents a little and just lighten up.

The spirit that should prevail at a Ryder Cup should be more like the atmosphere at the annual Men’s Invitational Tournament at my club, tucked away in rural Connecticut. It’s our big event of the year, and occurs on a Friday and Saturday in late July. Most every private club has some kind of event like this every year. It’s a member/guest tournament, meaning that the teams consist of a club member and a guest that they invite to participate. At our club, the competition consists of five nine hole matches within flights of six teams each. We play 27 holes on Friday and 18 on Saturday. The winning twosomes from each flight then have a shootout type of playoff to determine the overall winner. It’s a lot of fun and quite competitive but for the most part everyone maintains a sense of fun and the winners may get a few hundred dollars in pro shop credit and some other goodies. But mostly it’s played for fun and bragging rights. Sure every once in a while, someone gets bug up their nose about an alleged rules violation, but thankfully that is the exception. On Friday and Saturday there are big social events to which spouses are invited. There’s lots of eating, drinking, kibitzing and tall-tale telling. A Good Time Is Had By All, and with rare exceptions, people leave as friends and perhaps made a couple of new ones. But by the next year, only the winners remember who won and people look back on it with pleasure.

I think the GB/IR/Eu teams approach the Ryder Cup in much more of this amateur spirit of cammaraderie that you find at a member/guest tournament at a club. It’s not the prize, although that’s important, for sure. It’s the experience of competing and then, like Rugby teams, exchanging shirts at the end of the match and getting your drink on with new mates.

So, Paul Azinger, invite the other team over for some good Kentucky BBQ and a keg before the competition begins. Invite the wives, and enjoy yourselves. I’ll bet you do much better.