Omnia Mutantur

Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who’s thinking about starting a company?

Spolsky: I’ve got a lot: [laughs] Don’t do it. It’s going to suck. You’re going to hate it.

Can I steal one from Paul? Don’t start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don’t have two people (or I would even say three) that you’ve convinced to devote their lives to doing this, it’s just going to be a different thing. There are a lot of programmers that are very tentative about starting their own companies. There are a lot of working programmers doing something they hate, with some company that they hate, but they need money to pay the mortgage. So they figure, “I’ll develop something in my spare time. I’ll put in 1 hour every night and 2 hours on the weekends and I’ll start selling it by downloads.” And you say to them, “Who’s your cofounder?” And they say, “My significant other—husband or wife. My cat.”

But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere. Because they either have to succeed or get a job. Sometimes “succeed” seems like the easier path than actually getting a job, which is depressing.

So quit your day job. Have one other founder, at least. I’d say that’s the minimum bar to getting anywhere.

From the Joel Spolsky interview from Founders at Work.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Programming

Joel Spolsky has written a review of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, a book about the development of a personal information manager called Chandler. Started by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Corporation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the people behind Go Corporation (a company whose life and death is chronicled in Startup), Chandler was supposed to be a revolutionary personal information manager that would absolutely change how you handled your information.

Spolsky goes into great detail not only about the book but development processes in general, using Chandler as an example of how not to do things.

Say, for example, that your vision is to rebuild an old DOS personal information manager, which was really really great but totally unappreciated. It seems easy. Everything about how the whole thing works seems so obvious, you don’t even try to design the thing… you just hire a bunch of programmers and start banging out code.

Now you’ve made two mistakes.

Number one, you fell for that old overconfidence trick of your mind. “Oh, yeah, we totally know how to do this! It’s all totally clear to us. No need to spec it out. Just write the code.�

Number two, you hired programmers before you designed the thing. Because the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team.

[...]

Still, it’s a great look at one particular type of software project: the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the details were a little short. Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.� Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.� I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool�) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano�) you know you’re in trouble.

You can find the rest of this very enjoyable review here.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Programming

More programming geekery.

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Ricardo Programming

What follows is pure programming geekery. I should probably get a separate blog for this kind of stuff, but for now, non-programmers please move on to another one of our fine sections.

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Ricardo Programming

Joel Spolsky has a lengthy post on his blog about Microsoft bribing bloggers with laptops. Robert Scobble thought it was a great idea, but Joel disagrees.

Just because it’s someones job to do something, doesn’t make it ethical. Robert, your logic is faulty. Unless you want to assume that anything that Edelman does in the name of promoting Microsoft is automatically ethical, this logical argument you are making is simply false. For example, if Edelman paid a bribe to a government official to standardize on Windows, that would not be ethical, even though it’s their job.

[...]

Effectively Microsoft has bought publicity and goodwill. And even though the blogger has fully disclosed what happened, their message is corrupting the medium.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that this is ethically indistinguishable from bribery. Even if no quid-pro-quo is formally required, the gift creates a social obligation of reciprocity. This is best explained in Cialdini’s book Influence (a summary is here). The blogger will feel some obligation to return the favor to Microsoft.

He goes into great detail to explain why even if a blogger fully discloses receiving the hardware as a gift, the credibility damage has been done already.

Ricardo News and politics, Programming

How come I didn’t know about Krugle? It’s a search engine geared towards software developers, that helps you search for freely-available source code, projects and technical pages. Moreover, it’s got Wiki-like capabilities where if you find an useful piece of code that has no comments, you can annotate it for the next guy that comes along.

Check out their screencast if you have five minutes to spare. I’ll report more as I use it.

Ricardo Programming

I’ve been looking for blogging tools ever since I moved to a Mac. I considered ecto for a while, and I was close to licensing it when I found out that TextMate, which I already had paid for, provides a great blogging bundle. While it may not be as newbie friendly as ecto, it’s definitely great for someone with more html experience like myself (not to mention, who places a lot of value on control). The kicker is that posts are written in regular text, so even if I eventually drop the Mac to move to something else I won’t need to do anything special to take them with me.

TextMate, by the way, is a great editor for programmers. If you’re doing software development on a Mac, you should check it out – it’s managed to make me abandon Smultron.

PS: If you’re using WordPress as your blog application, you might want to check out this post on how to send the article dates. Short version for the impatient: use the latest WordPress and define TextMate’s environment variable TM_SEND_DATE_TO_WP to a value of YES. Environment variables are on Preferences > Advanced > Shell Variables.

Ricardo Programming

Just found a great little plugin for Wordpress that you can use for click-tracking your visitors. It called MengTracker, and you can find it here.

Update: If you’re having any problems getting links tracked, Menguzar has quite a few pointers on the comments section of his site.

Ricardo Programming

I’ve been very lucky these past few years, both personally and professionally. On my current project I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some great people, and work with two of the best and more dedicated developers I’ve met. Still, I’ve known my share of companies driven only by politics in the past, which is why Pete Wright’s tale of why he has left Microsoft technologies behind is so familiar:

I dreamed of working at Microsoft. When Microsoft joined up with Accenture to form Avanade the word Consultant sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I’d make it there as one of the elite band of Avanade consultants, spreading the Microsoft message all over the world. I dreamed of systems that would change lives, help people, and do cool new things never seen before.

Somewhere along the way though, things changed. I don’t know exactly when or how, but the world I loved got torn to shreds, set fire to, then mooshed into a pile of horse manure.

I found myself working with ‘day coders’, people with no passion, people that knew how to program and had learned how to do so simply because the money looked good. I found myself working with Project Managers with little or no experience of the field they were working in, habitually making appalling decisions day in and day out and kicking their teams of programmers when things went horribly wrong.

[...]

So, today I resigned my job, and completely ended my Microsoft career. I have taken a role as Director with a company at the leading edge of the “Web 2.0â€? curve. My team and I will write Ruby on Rails code, use Macintosh computers to do so, shun Microsoft technology completely, go to work in shorts and sandals and blast each other with nerf guns. My team is devoted to being the best it can be, to learning, to improving, to pushing boundaries. And it’s not Microsoft.

I’ve never met you, but Go Pete! I’ve found myself in a similar situation, slowly growing more and more bored of the Microsoft world and their old British man of a toolset, and spending more and more time working on other technologies from my MacBook Pro, the Bond girl of laptops. An eventual jump now seems a matter of when, not if, and the when seems to be drawing ever closer.

Ricardo Personal, Programming

The notMac challenge is a project to raise a bounty of $10,000 to be used as a prize for anyone who can come up with an open-source replacement for Apple’s .Mac service.

The goal of the notMac Challenge is to create the incentive for someone to make an alternative dotMac solution available for the general public. Since this is something that could benefit a large number of people in the Mac community, I figure what better way to create that incentive than to invite anyone interested to contribute to the reward.

To make the stakes even richer, I’ll match every contribution up to a total of $10,000. So, if you contribute $100, I’ll double it for a total of $200. Hopefully, in a short amount of time, the prize pool will be large enough to encourage someone out there to liberate the less technically literate of us from the obligation to pay Apple $99 a year.

It’s a worthy cause to which I probably will be contributing myself. Those technically inclined and with a server to spare might want to consider the instructions in Do It Yourself .Mac as a starting point.

Ricardo Programming, Science and Technology