Innovation in Software

On the GeekUp mailing list, some business development advice was being asked for in terms of growing revenues and finding sales channels.

The advice being offered was to specialise: choose a niche and excel within it. Good advice, but the recipient started talking about the problems that come with specialising in CakePHP – a technology framework for rapid development of web applications – and I felt compelled to chip in with advice I think might be worthy of putting to a wider audience:

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking specialisation means technology specialisation.

Business people don’t know about CakePHP. They know about e-Commerce, or customer forums, or customised marketing emails, or intranets where employees share knowledge.

Talk in their language, not yours.

When I go out and do sales, I talk about using Agile methodologies, iterative development, growing the technology base as revenue and budget allow. We use methods that ensure desired behaviour is captured and tested against cheaply, so changes in business assumptions are cheap to re-factor in the code – i.e. we reduce the cost of change to as close to zero as possible.

They couldn’t give a stuff what I’m actually saying is “we code Ruby on Rails with Cucumber, Culerity and RSpec tests”, because that doesn’t mean anything to them.

So, follow the market specialisation, not the technology specialisation when you speak to clients. Sure, choose the tech you like working with, but talk to your clients in terms of eCommerce stores, bold new ideas, e-mail marketing or super-slick brochureware sites as part of marketing campaigns.

Same as with selling anything: you sell benefits, not features*

All the big agencies I’ve seen thrive have chosen this style. The small guys seem to bang on about technology (or even worse “we only use GNU/Linux tools in production of your website”), and being able to do “anything” and get frustrated when people aren’t lining up at the door – the clients who like those shops generally aren’t the ones most of us want anyway.

* Before somebody points out that some gadgets “sell” on feature lists, that’s not what’s happening. When I say “this camera has triple 15 megapixel CCD sensors”, you might think I’m selling a feature. I know though that a geek who is into this price niche will likely transfer that feature in their head into “I can take really sharp pictures with good natural colour definition pictures with that camera”. I sold you a benefit via your own knowledge of the possibilities of the feature. :-)

It seems obvious, but most people miss it. Talking in the language of technology and features is a mistake I made for several years and am still struggling to deal with as I develop my new marketing material. The simple truth is, if they knew what all this BDD and Agile stuff was and why it was so good, they probably wouldn’t need our services. Now all I want to talk about when doing sales is business problems, issues and ideas and how to address them. Take heed, young grasshopper.

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

1. Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
2. Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
3. Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
4. Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
5. Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
6. Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
7. Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
8. Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
9. Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
10. Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.

One of my clients has hinted he wants me to talk about blogging to his team.

This surprised me.

Sure, I’ve blogged for years. Right now I have publish rights to about half a dozen blogs, the majority not created by me. I’ve got into some great events courtesy of my writing for MEN, won clients because of this blog, thousands of people read my words every month and I love writing and I want to continue doing it for the rest of my life.

However, I’m a developer, entrepreneur, analyst, systems administrator, systems architect, training guy and occasional blogger. I’m not one of the new breed of social media consultants who spend their days analysing how to grow blog and twitter audiences.

Can I tell anybody else how to blog? I’ve been thinking about where I’d start if I suddenly decided I was going to be a SMC, and came up with some questions I’d ask a client who wants to try and get into blogging.

1. What are your favourite blogs? If you don’t have any, that’s because you’re not reading any blogs. If you’re not reading material in the genre you’re writing for, you can’t understand how to write for it. It is evident that many bloggers do not read blogs just by reading the awful material they pour out..

   In a past life as an occasional freelance writer I had gigs writing speeches, editorials, in-flight magazine articles, essays, short stories and – yes, they really are made up by a staff writer in some cases – “Readers letters” for a top-shelf magazine. I have written novels for NaNoWriMo, attempted a screen play and I intend to write more just for the joy of writing in those genres. I researched each genre (the top-shelf research frankly left me disturbed), before I started writing for them. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what I was doing and the finished result would have been inadequate..

   If you aren’t up to speed, go and get a Google Reader account, learn about RSS and read some blogs in the area you’re writing for as well as blogs that interest you personally. Learn the styles, what works, what doesn’t, and ask around for other people’s favourites. An RSS reader like Google’s may allow you to skim through 30+ blogs a day in less than 10 minutes. If it takes too long, mark all as read and try again tomorrow.

2. What’s the style you’re aiming for? Do you need to remain formal and distant, or are you going to be more personable and “chatty”? It’s possible to be chatty *and* professional (I hope this blog proves that), but many new blogs seem to go too far into the extremes: they become stilted, boring diatribes in the style of press releases, or you discover an intellectual property lawyer going on about his cat three times a day. Both are wrong, and will fail quickly for good reason.

3. Do you actually care about what you’re writing about? If not, change it. You may need to write something in a particular area because your boss told you to, and you’d rather write about chocolate or your favourite football team, but you have to find the bit that excites you. If you can’t find something in there that excites you, maybe it’s time to consider whether you’re working for the right boss..

   It is nearly always possible however to find something that sings to you individually as well as is of appeal to the audience you’re aiming for – it’s only when you find that angle that the writing will flow and it’ll be enjoyable.

4. Who is your audience? This is critical. You need to think about your audience, why they should be interested in you, and how to make the most of their time. In the new information economy if somebody gives you their attention it should be considered a gift, so don’t waste it. Think about their needs, wants and expectations then try and work out how to meet them. In fact, no, exceed them..

   Interestingly, the audiences I’ve chased never arrived, and the audiences I have are people who just find something about me and my thoughts I didn’t know was there myself. That might be my bad execution, it could be a general lesson to learn. However not aiming at all is just going to result in a shambles.

5. Do you know what the basic blog article templates are? All writing is based on a template of some sort: boy meets girl movie scripts; best man’s speeches that leave the room laughing; murder mysteries littered with red herrings; etc. Blogging is no different..

   Here are some basic ones to get you going linked to articles I’ve written in template: response to news item or report; top tips for something (like this post); announcement of new product or service even if it’s quite small; link to article you liked with editorial (see below); rants dressed as analysis – even angry rants – seeking reaction or change; live-blogging of an event or conference.

   Mix up that lot within a niche, and you’re going to start building a brand.

6. You know it’s a conversation, right? I’m a hypocrite on this one as I link lightly, but blogging is a conversation. You link to articles you like by other bloggers, and they might link back to you. If your audiences are related, you both win. The link is like currency in the blogosphere as it greases the wheels of growing an audience.

   Some people have comments on their blogs. I do on some of mine. On this one, I don’t [edit: I now do] - that needs to change soon, but the Vagueware blog section is about to undergo a major re-jigging so it’ll wait until then. The conversation though is how you go from broadcast to social. If you’re not linking, you’re not commenting on other people’s blogs and you’re not open to people linking and commenting on your material, you’re not getting it. You’re just doing press releases in Wordpress.

7. Can you actually write? I don’t mean can you hold a pen, I mean can you hold an audience? Some can, some can’t..

   If you struggle to let writing flow, read more and think about what you’re reading. Roll nice sentences around in your head and think about how they work. Style guides might help, but only if you’re a robot. Read, read, read…

8. There are no forumlas, so why are you sticking to them? Everything I’ve just said could be wrong. It probably is. You need to experiment and listen to your own audience. I was on the panel at Speak To A Geek and when one audience member pointed out few in her target audience had access to a computer, I suggested she print things out and hands it to them – the blogosphere is not Neverland where all your communications problems are solved. Think. Act. Enjoy. See what happens.

I hope that helps somebody, somewhere. Writing it has helped me re-think a few things. And now I’ll see what I can do for that client…

Who would have thought that one of the most innovative players in the hosting and web application industry would be a bookshop?

One of the big problems with Amazon’s web services is that they aren’t that great for permanently hosted web applications. There’s the dynamic IP addressing issue (which weoceo will look after if you have the cash) and the serious problem of how to store your database.

S3 is very nice, but it stores flat data, and certainly not anything as fancy as SQL tables. Until recently there was a hacky way to do it with a special storage engine for MySQL, but just looking at it made me nervous about my data.

Well, Amazon have decided to fix this issue. I received this email from them this morning.

“Dear AWS Developers,

This is a short note to let a subset of our most active developers know about an upcoming limited beta of our newest web service: Amazon SimpleDB, which is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database – real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data – without the operational complexity.

Were excited about this upcoming service and wanted to let you know about it as soon as possible. We anticipate beginning the limited beta in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can read more about the service, and sign up to be notified when the limited beta program opens and a spot becomes available for you. To do so, simply click the “Sign Up For This Web Service” button on the web site below and we will record your contact information.

Learn more and sign up

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team”

So, there we have it. No more managing DB clusters. Scalable database tables, which once the beta is over will likely come with an SLA. Assuming that this just sits on top of S3, we might even be able to host our data inside the EU and get ll warm and fuzzy about protecting customer data properly.

I’m not sure this will be based on a standard set of DB libs but I expect we’ll see 1-line hacks to make it work with Rails, PHP and a host of other app frameworks within a few weeks.

I’m in.

Vagueware is not my only gig. My other Directorship is very low-key, doesn’t take much time, and is where I and my business partner experiment with various marketing revenue models. It’s primarily been a learning experience, and the frustration we’ve had over the last two years in getting various complex projects rolled out has meant we’ve been looking at partnering with technology companies and focusing on the marketing and customer communications side.

Our latest venture is quite a departure for us. Excuse me whilst I shill for a couple of paragraphs:

Whilst cash back websites are not brand new, we’re hoping that with a really solid technology platform underneath us, we’re going to be able to do something special in the way of helping people make shopping a little more fun – and save cash too. I do however, need some eyes and ears because I’ve had no control over technology roll-out, so I’m interested to hear of problems people might have.

As you can see, the concept is really simple. You sign up, we give you a fiver. You shop online, we give you a percentage of what you spend. You refer friends, we give them a fiver, and we give you a fiver as well once they qualify for payout. We’ll point you in the direction of freebies that pay you money as well. We’ll be launching a blog to highlight particularly good offers. Occasionally e-mails with super secret codes will land in your inbox and you will consider yourself a wise old bean for signing up with us. It makes things cheaper if you’re doing a lot of Christmas shopping online, although for various reasons we’re late to the party for that one, so our strategy is a little more long-term.

End of shill

I mention it here, because I’m interested in problems an educated audience (that’s you, dear reader), might see. We know for example that the back end systems are rock-solid and everything is nice and secure, but are there ‘quirks’ we’ve yet to spot that only a geek can spot? Maybe you just think the business model is odd, or we haven’t explained it very well. Either way, I wanted people whose opinions I respect to take a look before the big marketing push over the next 12 months, and see where we can make improvements.

When I started my business, I didn’t do things the way you’re “meant” to. I didn’t go out and get a nice office, or spend money on a brochure. To this day I don’t own a printer, and I send all my invoices electronically. For the first 18 months I worked on creaking hardware. My website was nothing more than a blog and I concentrated on just trying to get customers and pushing code out of the door – the shift into working for myself was big enough that it kept me busy without worrying about letterheads.

And at meetings, people politely laugh when I make a joke about “being too Web 2.0 and signed up to the digerati to bother with business cards”. Except I need business cards for all sorts of reasons these days. A year ago, I didn’t. Today, I do.

Last week a long-standing friend (and occasional colleague) launched Doddle, a printing service aimed at designers needing plain, simple, easy printing at low prices. It’s not true that I modeled for his logo – “Mr Doddle” – however I concede the resemblance is uncanny.

With a bit of prepped artwork – I needed help getting it into CMYK, because I don’t ‘do’ design packages – I went along, uploaded a zip file with the front and back graphics in there in TIFF, and filled in my billing and delivery details. It took about 5 minutes. That was Tuesday, and 10 minutes ago my new cards arrived.

I have to say I’m really pleased with the result. My cards are a little ‘unique’ in that they have a large block of text [1] on the back in quite small print, so I was worried if that would become a splodgy mess, but thanks to them being litho-printed, I’m pleased that it’s perfectly legible.

If anybody is looking for business cards, I’d challenge you to find a comparable quality at the price (especially for double-sided). I’m pleased therefore that recommendation of my friend’s business isn’t down to a form of nepotism, but because the product is actually worth the money.

[1] If you want to find out what exactly that block of text is, you’ll have to ask for a card. :-)

There are two kinds of innovation I want to talk about on vagueware:

• Ideas for whole new products and services that can be delivered with software
• Incremental changes to existing software products and services

I spend most of my time thinking about new products and services, the kind of thing that you can start a business off. Those ideas are generally jealously guarded by the people who think they thought of them first, but the simple truth is they have little value without execution: vagueware.com is about trying to get people executing on those ideas.

I have hundreds of ideas on my desk, on my wall, in my head, on my laptop, in notebooks, everywhere. They’re not going anywhere where they are. I do not have the time or the capital to make every single one of them happen. By placing them in the public domain over the coming months, I hope to do a couple of things:

• Somebody, somewhere will do something with them
• I will get the satisfaction that whilst not benefiting monetarily, I helped an entrepreneur and his customers

I hope that if you have an idea that you realise you’re never going to make happen, you’re going to have the courage to place it in the public domain and allow open source developers, start-ups and hobbyists in need of a way to spend their evening get started with it. They might even give you money, you never know.

Then there’s the second kind of idea – the incremental idea. The idea where you see a product or service out on the web or on your machine and you think “that’s great, but if it did…”

I’ve started cataloguing ideas I’ve had for vagueware and tagging them ‘vagueware’ – you can add ideas for vagueware too, and tag them so I see them – and as votes move up and down I’ll see what’s popular and what isn’t. I’ll use the tool itself to decide what to work on next within the tool. Yay for recursion!

I hope other developers use the site to do the same. By putting up ideas on the site for your own product and asking customers to go along and vote, you can get an assessment of what is going to fly and what isn’t.

Every page is editable, wiki-style, so your customers can improve your idea. Every idea has comments so you can have a little conversation around an individual idea.

By looking at a list of ideas in vote order, you can decide what is going to make customers happiest. By putting it on a 3rd-party site like vagueware, you get exposure to a whole bunch of people interested in people like you – innovative developers – who might not have heard of you anywhere else.

Or maybe you can just put an idea up and tag it with a publisher or product name in the hope that somebody at HQ will see it one day and act on it.

We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have of how the Internet works. We know that an image in a search result might be linked to a site that has nothing to do with the image. We know that just because a reader of a blog comments on a post and links to a picture, it doesn’t mean the blog owner has endorsed or in any way taken ‘control’ of that picture.

We know this.

Some people though, aren’t quite as smart as us. They think that you have more control over how Google sees you than you do. They think that if you link to a picture you are ‘trying to take it over’. They don’t understand hypertext, they don’t understand indexing algorithms and they certainly don’t understand how this all applies in terms of copyright. Don’t believe me?

TechCrunch is currently dealing with perhaps the most technically inept man on Earth representing a photographer in an argument over online copyright and image distribution.

The problem is that he has a little knowledge – pictures can drive traffic, and that drives revenue – but not enough knowledge to understand what TechCrunch’s role is in this instance.

Even worse, he’s decided to act in a way I would consider unethical by phoning advertisers and threatening to name them in a lawsuit explaining he “just wanted to let [them] know”, in that I’m-doing-you-a-favour-don’t-look-at-me-like-I’m-a-leech kind of way.

This makes me come to the following conclusions:

1. If I ever need to hire a photographer, I’m never going to hire Beth Boldt as she clearly hires idiots to represent her legally (although he doesn’t appear to be a lawyer), and I really don’t want to deal with idiots working on her behalf
2. If you’re ever going to threaten to sue somebody, maybe you shouldn’t threaten Mike Arrington who is, you know, a lawyer, and knows what he’s doing… (top tip Mike learned at law school: use spell check before hitting ‘send’).
3. All of us have a responsibility to make sure the people acting on our behalf – personally, or within our companies – understand the issues as they really are.

If you’re working in a corporate environment in the UK, you should make sure at least some of your directors or somebody over at legal checks out Out-Law.com once in a while, and if you’re freelancing or a SME, its RSS feed should be part of your morning coffee ritual.

Nat Torkington writes about the effects data flows are having on him. I also find that once every 2-3 months I suddenly notice there are many sources of information I’m not really reading any more, and so I have a purge.

He makes a point about Facebook which I find interesting. With some customisation, it is possible to tailor what you see and what you don’t (yes, you can turn off the stuff you’re not interested in). As such, we’re able to tailor how we spend our time on Facebook to make it useful for us. That doesn’t mean we spend any more time on Facebook, it just makes that time more productive.

What if all applications were able to work like that? What if we took the “News Feed” concept of Facebook and dropped it into the front page of all our applications and then allowed the user to specify what they wanted to see more or less of, and allow them to tailor the productivity?

In the last 24 hours, I have probably written more code than I have in the previous week. It’s tested, solid, and ready to roll out. I now know how to get into this zone more easily in future. Even with Fresher’s Flu having an effect on my performance this last week, I’m surprised by my findings.

I’m typing this sat in a coffee shop overlooking Albert Square in Manchester. The sun is just about to dip below the buildings to the West, and the cobbles have that weird liquid gold colour they get in late Autumn evening light. It’s irresistible to sit here and stare and watch Mancunians go about their business. People all around me are talking, laughing, joking, arguing. A couple across the road just married at the Town Hall are having their photos taken, and the crowd is making a little noise.

Meanwhile I’m writing code (and this article), and it’s just struck me that right now, right here is when I am at my most productive.

I always thought my method was the exact opposite of this. Around a year ago, I wrote an article on “The Zone” and at the time observed:

‘Getting into the zone is not always easy. Different people have different techniques, nearly all of which involve a bit of peace and quiet and no interruptions.

…

Once you’re there, the worst thing that can happen is to be interrupted – I frequently shut down mail and IM clients when I want to make progress. When I used to work in shared offices, I would find a quiet corner. I shouted at people who interrupted me with trivial problems and put signs on my desk saying “Please don’t disturb unless building is on fire”.’

The key to my mind has always been to avoid interruptions. Peace. Quiet. That’s all you need, right? Well, not quite.

You see, I am not in a peaceful situation right now. It certainly isn’t very quiet. It’s actually quite a bit of a racket going on around me – coffee machines, frappes being mixed with ice, a dozen conversations, now I notice a kid is being a bit brattish in the corner. Yet here I am, working in perfect flow.

In the last year and a half I’ve mostly been working from home, and I’ve found it harder to get into the flow, the zone has been alluding me. My usual practice is to make sure absolutely nothing can disturb me and then try and work in complete silence. Except that’s really, really hard.

I think the important thing is, I need trivial noise in the background as that forces me to focus and try and block things out. Complete silence leaves a big empty noise in my head that needs to be filled with thought and it’s too easy to lose focus. A mild noise I need to work very slightly at blocking out forces me to really lock into the task in front of me. Hours could pass, and I wouldn’t notice, but for the cobbles dimming outside the window.

I still can’t get into zone thought if even one single phone call or IM message calls me away in the middle of something. Having a direct interruption is as dangerous as ever. So I’ve revised my thinking: “trivial distraction = good, direct interruption = bad”. I am starting to get into the habit of setting my status to “Away” when I’m working so I only get distracted by urgent/important issues.

It really has caught me by surprise though, just how solid the work I produce is when I’m sat in a coffee shop full of students. A year ago when I wrote the first article I would have laughed at anybody suggest anything like it. Now I know better, and will seek out coffee shops and places of mild, indirect distraction as often as possible.