Innovation in Software

The more observant amongst you will have noticed a couple of things about this blog recently:

1. There have been very few updates in recent months
2. When I have updated it, I haven’t been talking much about innovation in software, which given the title is what you’d expect

Most of the cool little things I see out there I am now throwing out via Twitter, and as time is – now more than ever – a premium commodity for all of us, I don’t think it’s fair to keep on dumping my brain into the ether.

For 2010, Vagueware will get a new website (sneak peek the beta if you want) and a new, more “corporate” feel blog. The RSS feed you might be reading this through will move across to that new blog. It might be a little drier, but it will focus on what we’re actually up to over at Vagueware HQ a little more closely.

In addition, in the first quarter of 2010, I’ll be starting up several brand new blogs each with a specific focus. I have a wide range of interests when it comes to software, and I think each area deserves attention all by itself. It helps you as a reader to segment them more, and it helps me stay focused when I write – something this blog has suffered from.

Specifically, you can look out for blogs focusing on digital entrepreneurship, software development process and best practice, and a couple of other ideas I’ve been mulling over for a while. Each of those will be announced at the new blog, along with the product announcements (no, really!), planned for early 2010.

The experiments conducted here will continue in other channels – such as getting the community to pay for half my time for the first part of 2010 – and I can’t see me giving up blogging completely at all any time soon.

However, in essence, this is the last post for Innovation in Software for now. A message will appear on all pages stating this site is now here purely as an archive, and all comments will be turned off in one week. No need to unsubscribe from RSS – you will be moved magically over to the new blog feed soon. Thank you for your continued readership, and I hope that at some point since this blog started on September 1st 2006 , I’ve given you something to think about and/or enjoy.

You might have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet the last 5-6 weeks.

I was unfortunately confined to my bed for most of December and in the last couple of weeks have been catching up with work and have had a bit more ill-health in the last few days to boot (top tip: never search Google for symptoms of ill health, it will scare the crap out of you). Whilst the disadvantages of being ill are of course many (I will refrain from describing them in detail in my particular case in some vain hope you might care), one advantage I found is all you can do is lie there, thinking. I do my best work when I can think properly.

I’m now almost back into full swing and working out my priorities for this year. Interestingly, in the last week those priorities changed somewhat and the impact on internal Vagueware projects will be substantial. More on all that soon, watch this space, etc.

2009 is likely to to be my year of doing less. I’m going to do less events, spend less time hunting clients (many of them have gone into recessionary hibernation anyway), less hours spent at screen (I averaged around 60 hours/week last year), and much less coding I don’t enjoy.

Vagueware will be three years old this Spring, and growth has suffered due to trying to do too much. That might sound counter-intuitive but as in all aspects of life, we get where we want to be through focusing, not through doing lots of things as hard as possible.

2009 is also hopefully going to be my year of doing more of the things that count. I’m going to do more talking, more listening, more writing, more delegating, more hiring (not for skills you might expect), more growing and more clients. I am also going to do a lot more thinking.

More generally I think this year is going to be perhaps the biggest shake-down in the sector we’ve seen since the crash in 2001, but I remain confident that recessions are when the foundations of the greatest businesses are made. Crisis is in the eye of the beholder, as is opportunity. The next few years are going to be incredible for those adequately prepared.

Good luck to all of you for 2009, whoever you are and whatever your plans are.

I’m doing a lot of re-organising at the moment. There are a lot of things going on within the business that means I have to think about what is happening, where and when. Those of you who know me personally know that I have given serious consideration to wrapping the business up and doing something else instead. Over the last week I’ve made some decisions.

Whilst this does not go into immediate effect, a new website will be coming online at vagueware.com in the next week (and the site currently there will find a new home announced at the same time) which will in effect take over from blog.vagueware.com (the one you’re reading now) which will remain in place, but is unlikely to be updated much in future.

I started out wanting to talk about ‘Innovation in Software’ here but quickly discovered two things:

1. Too much of it is happening to make meaningful sense of it all
2. Most of it is incredibly dull

Therefore, rather than let this site languish I want to move things onto something more useful, pertinent and direct.

Those of you taking the RSS feed via feedburner (as I’m sure you all are), will notice a change in the name and content, but you will not have to make any changes to subscriptions: I’ll move you across seamlessly.

So, what’s going to be on the new site? What is this new direction?

Vagueware’s core activity is essentially building web applications and helping other businesses build web applications.

Whilst Vagueware Ltd will (for now) remain the holding company for Kagtum and Fluxish, I have found myself in the position of offering consultancy around architecture, deployment, developer liaison and industry best practice. Some of my work has started to cross over into project management, business process delivery and some rather wishy-washy areas that most developers do not have to touch, or choose not to because they think these things are unimportant: the new site will be focused on building that business with articles that should help do what I find myself doing in real life, that is bridge the gap between business managers and developers.

Believe it or not, when you start looking at development decisions from the perspective of cash flow, shareholder security and board authority you become a better developer. Likewise when you look at business issues from the perspective of development resources, 3rd-party frameworks and test driven development, you become better at business. That’s the niche I now find myself in: explaining to both the other side’s position. It’s interesting work at times, and allows me to be part-coach, part-developer, part-consultant and part-entrepreneur all at the same time. I’m now doing this for two organisations regularly and am applying some of the lessons to my own business plans.

Now I plan to share those lessons.

Some of you will disappear, others will arrive. I just hope that in the long term this is a right turn.

What it does mean big-picture wise though is a decision has been made: I’m staying in the industry. For now. I’m not dumping development any time soon but I’m certainly finding other things to do that have made life a bit more interesting.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting some pestering from Manoj over my business and how to develop it. The conversation last week took it a step further: stop trying to do everything within Vagueware and instead concentrate on coming up with ideas and then – critically – finding the team to make the ideas happen. I might be great at ideas, and able to hold my own as a developer and somebody able to build a cashflow model, but I can’t do marketing to save my life. Nor can I handle PR, design, or think of everything else that needs to be thought of.

Of course, this took the usual pattern of my conversations with Manoj: we started with “Manoj, you’re such a doofus”, and ended with me thinking about it and conceding he might have a point.

Right now, I have so many ideas to work on they just sit here. They do nothing whilst on my desk. That was why I built vagueware originally – push the ideas out there, somebody, somewhere is bound to get on with them. I left myself with just a few ideas to work on:

• My own consultancy: helping businesses develop software solutions. Two years ago that took the form of offering services as a Rails developer and has evolved to the point that next year it will take the form of managing a range of developers and being the bridge between the business World and the geek World
• The Idea Bank: allow people to post ideas, and build a business around encouraging innovation
• Kagtum: A new way of thinking about news, relevant content and what people need to know about the World around them
• Fluxish: An idea I’ve not blogged about, but ultimately comes to down to very scalable “it just works” web application hosting that takes the pain away from growing an online business

Guess what? That’s still too many ideas. I figured with 400+ ideas, taking just 1% of them for myself and shoving the other 99% “out there”, the 1% would become manageable. That hasn’t happened and it means whilst the consultancy is doing “OK” it’s not doing “great” and all the other ideas are suffering from neglect.

I’ve made a decision then. I’m now reducing the number of projects I work on: my day job is now the consultancy and the idea bank.

Except I still want to make Kagtum happen, and I still want to make Fluxish happen, and there are four or five ideas outside of those I’d like to see come to life in the next 12 months.

How am I going to do this? Well, I’m going to start putting teams together who want to take equity in an idea and with a mixture of design, developer, PR and other skills, we’re all going to own a share in a business that we get to the point of being of interest to external funding – or even better, making money on its own two feet – with a view to exit.

So, if you think this sounds like something you want to work on (particularly if you’re interested in Kagtum or Fluxish), or you have skills outside of development such as PR and marketing, and you think you could give up 5-10 hours/week for a business you’d have equity in, you might want to get in touch with me. If you’re not convinced, you need some idea as to what is involved and want me to blog some more, leave a message in the comments.

After a brief spurt of articles, I’ve slowed right down posting. It’s not accidental – it’s very considered in fact – and I thought it might be worth sharing a few plans.

I had a queue of about 90+ articles in draft ready to be finished and posted. At a rate of three per day, plus adding at least two more in draft form onto the queue I would have had the momentum to keep me going through to the end of the year.

I stepped back though and thought about why I wanted to publish here, what this blog was for, and whether that was a sensible strategy. I started asking whether I should care if this tool does this or that tool does that.

There are much bigger ideas we’re heading towards that need something more thoughtful than twenty blog articles a week.

I have yet decide my approach, but what readers enjoy matters. I get virtually no feedback about what people like beyond Google Analytics tells me, and it tells me little. I get few people quoting me and linking back to articles. I get few comments. In other words, it’s a little hard to know what is working and what isn’t beyond “being angry about Leopard” gets me traffic.

Questions for you then: what articles do you enjoy or hate? What do you want to see more of or less of?

I turned off blog comments a little over two months ago [and explained my reasons why] at the time. Virtually everybody I personally know who reads this blog disagrees with that decision. Most of them never commented, but that’s not the point. They feel there is an injustice in the fact they can’t unless they blog about it themselves.

My life has been a little easier without having to log in daily and moderate the spam out of the system, but overall I think it’s harming the blog not to let people give some feedback directly. I’d love it if they took the time to write up an article on their own blog and link back, but that’s just not happening. It’s time for a re-group.

From this article forward, comments are back, and will never close on any article.

They will be moderated, and I’m going to be inclined to block one-liners or unrelated comments, whether they be spam or not. Of course, even if your comment doesn’t get published I’ll still read it, so feel free to be abusive if you wish. :-)

[UPDATE]: it would appear the comments stuff got broke whilst having a rest. No more than one comment gets attached to each post for some reason. I’ll look into it ASAP. So, for now, first mover wins. :-)

As a rule, I hate blog posts about blogging. I also particularly hate blogs that cite posts that in themselves are citations on other blog posts. It is then, with regretful hypocrisy that I find myself citing Joel Spolsky whose post in turn cites Dave Winer. Even worse, Joel is citing a blog post made nearly 8 months ago. That said, I think the point being made is of interest and might change the way we think about user-generated content over the next 12 months.

Joel’s main point is that comments are next to pointless. He doesn’t allow comments on his blog, neither does Dave Winer. Their argument is that as a means to self-expression, the author has a right not to be bombarded with people shouting them down and they shouldn’t have to see “their space” polluted with garbage.

The flaw with this idea is the idea that blogs are a means of self-expression. They are not. They are a way to find like-minded people and to provide a low barrier of entry to getting involved in w global discussion about the things you care about. They are not billboards, they are not magazines, they are not leader columns in newspapers. Nor are they journals or fascinating insights into your unique and tortured soul (you delicate little snowflake, you).

They are about a two-way dialogue, a means to advance ideas and to further understanding in the most cost-effective and uncensored way possible. I could produce a magazine about innovation in software but that would bankrupt me – instead, when I get time, I put articles up here as and when. I might not get tens of thousands of readers, but I certainly get hundreds (in fact, 2,167 unique visitors in the last 30 days have visited blog.vagueware.com which is not too shabby). And some of them – very occasionally – leave a comment here.

The purpose of all this is to encourage a conversation. Comments and trackbacks are typically an important part of inviting people and saying “Please! Come on in and tell me what you think!” and help move things along.

The real problem is that really interesting ideas are never in the comments. I don’t get the turf wars that spark off on other blogs because every comment is moderated – I don’t allow through spam, abuse, or one-liners and so the comments are worth reading normally, but normally nobody ever reads them. The comments are typically idle thoughts, occasional insights, sometimes intelligent but often just a throwaway quip. They intrigue me, but the comments are not what excites me about the conversation around here – it’s the people who link here.

When somebody sits down and decides to push the conversation further by spending 30 minutes writing a piece about something I’ve written, edited it, made a decision that they’d be happy for their name to be next to those words for all eternity (the Web never forgets), and then publishes it with a link back to here, the quality is generally higher than somebody who quickly fills in a little box at the bottom of the page.

I haven’t had many inbound links, but the ones I’ve had have always made me think more about what I do and why I do it than any comment ever has. There used to be a load of links when this blog lived at a different URL, fewer now, but in time I expect that’s where the interesting ideas will come from.

This line of thinking seems to be an emerging trend out there.

Recently, there has been a lot of love for Tumblr, a blogging platform without comment facilities. I think it’s a daring tactic, and one that will improve the quality of the content they carry. It’s also wise engineering with a direct impact on profitability. All of a sudden they don’t need to worry (quite as much) about spam. They don’t need to worry (quite as much) about authentication. They need less storage on their servers. The code is simpler. It even helps their authors. If I see something on a tumblr blog I have a choice:

• Do nothing
• Link to it in an article here that expands my own thoughts on the subject

Either way, the noise level within the conversation is minimal and providing I’m not an illiterate moron, the signal goes up. What’s more, the author of the tumblr blog doesn’t just get his own audience thinking about what he wrote, but perhaps some of mine as well. A few people might link to my piece so I get their audience, and so does the tumblr blog. This is how it’s meant to happen.

The author has no worries about spam, or about people cluttering up their space with thoughts that just don’t “get it”. They just get to go on linking to people and watching out for who links to them by way of Technorati or similar.

In short, comments aren’t a bad idea because you have a right to not be shouted down, they’re a bad idea because they slow the conversation down. They raise noise, deplete signal and keep the A-list static.

As such, I’ve decided that as of today comments are closed here. It makes my life easier, and hopefully yours too. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, you can make comments on the notes that get imported from here automatically if you want, but if you really have something to say about anything you read here, I’d ask you to post a link on your own blog. I’ll see it (I track every inbound link) and if I think it’s relevant I’ll update the article you point to. I may even write a new article pointing back at you. We both benefit.

If you don’t have a blog, I have to ask: what on earth are you waiting for? Tumblr awaits…

Vagueware Ltd is registered in England, no. 5700421

The Registered address for the company is currently:

16 Shearway Business Park
Folkestone
CT19 4RH

However, all correspondence should be sent instead to:

55 Velvet Court
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You can also e-mail us and we’ll give you a call right back.