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I came across an article by Joel Spolsky in Inc. Magazine announcing he’s quitting his blog.
For one of the original software development bloggers, at the center of the startup, micro-isv movement to make a decision like this, it seems a little strange at first..
Joel mentions a number of reasons that I think are interesting of what a startup may face, once a startup has.. started up.
- Part of the reason he’s no longer writing is that he has so many customers that his blog posts seem to deeply offend one of his clients in one way or another.Plausible? Sure. But isn’t differentiation what a product is built on? I think this could be the topic of a blog post on it’s own by Joel to see what kind of things others in startups have to look forward to when you get large(r).
- Growth means there’s revenue for traditional advertising. I would think, though, that tools for developers are ultimately best directly connected to them instead of magazine ads?
Joel might be big enough and he doesn’t need to, or can’t benefit from blogging as he did prior… With Stack Overflow taking on the answer / thought market and opening things up beyond him, maybe there’s room for a lot more voices, that can be found easily.
Maybe Joel was developing the best bug tracking software in the world, and attracting the best developers in the world, so that when FogBugz reached it’s sweet spot, he can go onto building the best software company in the world?
Who knows.
I do know that writing, and sharing doesn’t leave you once you start, and know the value of being shared with, especially after many years.
Joel’s posts have helped so many that I don’t think many will lose their value or relevance. Whether it was the pay-scale matrix, or why the command and conquer or econ 101 management won’t work with software developers, it’s rare to have reasonably concise, applicable, exploratory rants that were sane as it’s readers most of the time, and willing to have it’s share of mind-stretching ideas like anyone being stretched by growth.
If this is the last of Joel blogging, thanks for doing it. The fact that Joel replies to emails and shared what he learnt so others could join the movement to make the world a better place with better software.
Will it be the last we hear from him in books, conferences, articles elsewhere..? Doubt it. His recent introduction to mercurial at www.hginit.com is a prime example.
I hope Joel continues to create and write, and if not, we see his writing has inspired others to write and share.
Joel I know you read more than you ever let on, so if your eyes reach here, which I’ll do my best to ensure, remember that with our talents we have a responsibility to share what has been shared and taught to us by life and others. No guilt trip intended, the world owes us nothing. 
Let’s step back from this and see the general picture.
Does this decision by Joel mean blogging is ultimately useless for startups? I don’t think so. At all.
Most companies, indeed, do use their blogs for boring news releases is relevant.
Blogs are all about relevancy. Blogs, like products that provide relevancy thrive.
Blogs will always have their place to share information, and for us, resources for startups looking to reach their market through the public seeking their content. If you don’t have the marketing money, a blog is a key way to demonstrate and share expertise and knowledge.
I can say that the last year of writing this blog has showed me that I need to write more, and often.
- In: Customers| FogBugz| Marketing| Productivity| Social Media| Startups
- Tags: blogging, Marketing, programming
Einstein wasn’t wrong when he said the only thing that got in the way of his learning was his education. Learning how to think — creatively to solve problems, to find dots and connect them, are skills that are hard to find, hard to develop, especially when we can get into a trance with technology.
I think we’re most alive when we create.
So that’s all I’d do. Create, create, create. Solutions for lots of problems, in lots of ways, to realize that everyone just wants to answer one question with their solutions nearly every time. “Where is everything at?”
Learning how, and why to think from multiple perspectives when looking at solving a problem is infinitely more important than the tool(s) you pick to use them.
The tools you pick will be better based on the clarity and your ability to boil things down to their essence. Tools that increase clarity and decrease confusion are good. Tools that let you (and users) get more done with less effort, are good.
Helping people make the world a better place by letting the system manage the details, and letting people manage the system (and relationships with others) is what can empower software to change the world for the better, instead of dealing with the 70% of failing projects out there.If
- In: Algorithms| Development
Ooops – Automation can be dangerous
24 Feb2010
So… had a bit of a mixup.
February was a bit of a busy month for me so I wrote some content in advance to publish for sure, and to add more when I had the chance..
Evidently, PHP and wordpress do not work out of the box to automaticaly publish scheduled content.
Maybe I should go to a ColdFusion blog. 
In any event, my apologies, I’ll post the rest and it should show up on the RSS feeds.
- In: Algorithms
In creating software, be it a startup or a client project, key decisions need to be made and implemented based on security.
In building secure applications that let me sleep at night, I have learnt a few things:
- Security is relative. You must keep up, and ahead of the curve. Your thinking and design must be steps ahead of what’s happening and what may be possible in the near future. In the end, if someone wants to, given enough of their time, resources and money (more than what you have spent) it, still, conceivably, is possible that security may be compromised.
- Security vs. Convenience. Unless you are a expert of making complex security disappear “under the covers”, there is still a fundamental acknowledgment that has to be made. The more security you implement in an application, the performance, and usability of that application becomes less than simple.
- The path of least resistance. Instead of building a big, thick wall of security, consider building many, thinner walls. Just like someone who asks you a question instead of googling it, someone wanting access to a system will want to do so the quickest way possible. If they are out to find the next outpost, they will move on if there is layer after layer of security, like an onion skin.
Why? Most unscrupulous attempts to access a system aren’t really about you. Most valuable is the most generic. Your server resources to be illegitimately used to send out spam, etc, and not necessarily for what your application itself does. The reality is most attempts to break into your site will be automated scripts/botnets that sweep the entire internet. While you can build mega security features, a lot can be said by good design and putting up multiple “walls” instead of one big “wall”. Design your application to inherently check and enforce security as much as it can internally. Package it with smart public facing interfaces, properly hardened and tested with client and server side scrubbing and validation, and we have a start.
- Passwords be safe. Do your best, reasonably to secure the single, most vulnerable part of your system. Relative to the sensitivity of what is behind the password, implement password security measures. Logarithmic delays between failed attempts. Log and report invalid attempts. Encrypt your passwords.
One of the biggest things you can do if/where necessary is to store your passwords securely. This is a great article on How to safely store a password.
If you have any ideas to add to this list, please leave them in the comments.. I’ll update the list!
- In: Algorithms| Development| Startups
A few years ago I vaguely remembered reading about an Apple patent. Nothing out of the ordinary with their patents, just another way of doing something, that they may, or may not do.
Apple is expected to announce a Tablet on January 28th or so. What I’m more interested to see is if they’ll release a real gamebreaker — this docking station for a tablet. I think it’s fair to accept the first Apple tablet will be like the first iPhone. Groundbreaking, and having it’s limits as well that the second and third versions of the tablet will hopefully address.
But, I’m all about the docking station. For the life of me I’ve never been able to understand why a $3000 Apple laptop doesn’t have a docking station. I come from the Compaq/HP commercial notebook background where a docking station was a way of life and a great way to save wear and tear on the ports of your laptop. With the increased mobility that people have with their laptops, having to use a third party product like BookEndz, while very capable would be nothing compared to using a real docking station with one docking port.
Onto this tablet. Take a look at what could be the perfect tablet docking station. Slide the tablet into the iMac Display….
This could be the Apple docking station for their tablet.
Check out the article and drill into the patent application from there!
- In: Uncategorized
Great Software Systems
2 Jan2010
Happy New Year!
The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to continue to build in 2010.
Whether you are on the business side of technology, or the implementation side, there are some common elements to all projects no matter the viewpoint.
Great software systems:
- Make users great. Make your users awesome at what they do when they use your software. If you don’t, you have a dud.
- Are mature. People manage the system, the system manages the details. Immature: People make their own systems, manage their own details, nothing is connected, or consistent.
- Understand the data is the system: The data is the system to the end-user. Not your software. The software is merely packaging to the information they need.
- Understand the integrity of the data: What is the data. What does it mean. What states does it exist in. How does it interact with other data. Why is this important?
- Keep the edge: Software is built around the competitive advantage of magnifying and fueling the existing best practices of “This is how we do it here”. Don’t lose it by doing it your way.
- Are invisible: “Don’t make me think” when I use it.
- Self-Monitor: Bring things to my attention
- Master the Complex: It ’s easy to make things complex. It is hard to make complexity into something simple. Understand that complexity is not the issue most of the time. It’s confusion.
Maybe this will become a growing list! Add your own below!
- In: Algorithms| Design| Development| Startups
It’s always interesting to see the design / default setting considerations made in software.
One that has always stuck out to me is I can’t figure out for the life of me why most IDE’s don’t enable line numbers by default. No matter what we write, sooner or later we have to refer to the line number.
Luckily for Adobe’s ColdFusion Builder, which is based on Eclipse, the setting is a few simple clicks.
- Go into preferences
- Click on General in the left menu bar
- Click Editors
- Click on Text Editors
- You will see the fourth checkbox says “Show line number”. Click this on to enable it, and then click OK.
Below is a handy screenshot to know exactly where to click. Enjoy!
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Enabling Line Numbers to be visible in Adobe ColdFusion Builder
- In: Coldfusion
One of the neat discoveries about ColdBox is the ColdBox plugin for Adobe ColdFusion Builder.
Here’s the problem… I couldn’t get the ColdBox Platform Extension installed in ColdFusion Builder with the existing instructions in the link above. I suspect the older version of the ColdFusion Builder allowed you to do it from more than one location.
In any event, you have to Click on Window > Show View > Other > Extensions , and allow the extension pane to appear at the bottom of your screen (as my default installation shows). Then, click on the (+), select the ColdBox Extension zip file and go through the normal setup.
If you’re interested in a quick screencast, all 1 minute of it is below!
http://screencast.com/t/YzdhMjI1M
The things it helps you handle include (Quoted from page above):
- Create handlers, plugins, interceptors and model objects with awesome wizardry
- Create an event handler and have it auto-generate the views, etc.
- Plugin Wizard
- Interceptor Wizard
- Model Object Wizard.. and more
ColdFusion builder is in late-ish beta and it’s great to see some of the plugins that we have for it already. It’s nice to see such a tool evolving.
Happy ColdBoxing!
- In: ColdBox| Coldfusion
Impressions of ColdBox 3.0
19 Dec2009
Once you’re past why someone would develop a new program in ColdFusion, you find a rich community of developers, examples, libraries and frameworks.
I’ve been playing around with the ColdBox Framework for ColdFusion for a few months.
What lead me to ColdBox was a period of discovering and playing around with the discoveries I made with ColdFusion 9 and it’s killer Hibernate ORM integration.
I could no longer program, ever again until ColdFusion 9 came out.. it made for a slower fall on new projects. I decided to dust off the old exploration cap and started looking at what was new and developing in the ColdFusion world.
For about as long as I can remember I’ve been using FuseBox and my own frameworks prior to it coming into existence. In my modified FuseBox framework I have a simple, efficient, scalable system that has easily handled anything I’ve thrown at it, and more. It’s very capable and rightfully so.
FuseBox is ColdFusion’s first major Framework and went on to dominate and inspire a lot of change in the PHP world not only with FuseBox itself, but the other great frameworks that exist in that language and maybe beyond. Sitting in the ColdFusion world it’s nice to see that the ColdFusion “power with ease” eloquence was able to help spread this kind of empowerment, as much as ColdFusion’s continued track record of doing the best of similar languages and frameworks. No offence intended to any of the other great CF frameworks out there — I just didn’t feel the itch to shop around because I felt I had the good stuff at home.
No language, in my experience, has focused on the developer and their experience as much as ColdFusion. Happy developers make great software. I like being happy doing what I do.
I came across ColdBox and remembered seeing an earlier version around 2006 that looked really promising. It looks like it’s been delivering on it’s promises. In defense of my beloved FuseBox, I haven’t looked at the new version in a few years because the one I use has worked so well!
The first thing that struck me was the sheer volume of documentation available on ColdBox.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Someone, actually, seemed, to get the significance of, and anticipate the needs of web application development, and ColdBox was the result. This was like Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe continuing to anticipate the needs of application developers with ColdFusion. ColdBox looks to this software architect to be the next shining star of ColdFusion, if it’s not already. It improves both applications and developer’s lives.
We know that application development and application developers are kept happy in some common and unique ways.
At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. Everything I’ve needed to touch or use, with respect to a web application and it’s framework, seemingly, conveniently put in one place. Internationalization, no problem. Need role based security? No problem. Want to add a doo-dad? Decide if you want an interceptor or a plug-in. Next question.
What is a software architect to do when something makes him blink? Get a second opinion from the smartest developer he knows.
My friend is someone I’ve known for almost 15 years. We shared a path in school but I went off the ColdFusion deep end while he continued learning everything under the sun… except ColdFusion.
So I asked for his unbiased opinion. Which he’s known to give. I asked him, find me every fault in this ColdBox and the language of ColdFusion compared to all the languages you’ve ever used. As a developer completely fresh to this, tell me if something is better than this, and why, because I might want to switch.
Expecting him to correct ColdFusion, and ColdBox the same way he used to correct the professors, assignments, quizzes, exams, and TA’s in university, he came back convinced that ColdBox and ColdFusion is great for developing web applications. Not to say something else wasn’t, but if he’d pick something ot build on his own he just might use it, especially with the open-source ColdFusion engines like Railo and Open BlueDragon.
So, I’m not crazy. That’s good.
Here’s the thing with ColdBox for me. It does MVC, really well, for the web, for web applications. Yeah, I know Ruby’s got this, ASP.NET’s got that, and Django has something else that’s great. I have used them all, either with new projects, or maintaining existing ones.
The thing that happens with any project, over time, is that it either becomes one you want to work on more and more, or one you don’t want to work on due to increasing complexity to add or modify tasks.
We can argue it’s up to the developer to keep things simple, but inevitable the platform and framework play a huge role in what we do, or don’t have to do, or what we do/don’t deal with.
If we put all the languages, frameworks into one pile, there is one key test I use to see the value of any tool.
It is difficult to make the complex into something simple; and it is easy to make the simple into something complex. Will this help me make the complex into something simple, without dealing with the language, or framework’s complexities?
ColdBox, with ColdFusion seems to understand that most of us have to build things that are solid, reliable and scalable. 99% of web applications that are remotely successful grow. We need a way to manage that growth and keep the garden looking nice while it grows.
Web developers often have to solve more than simple problems. We have to solve complex problems and make them simple. There is little doubt ColdFusion is the best integration language for the web. It simply does more out of the box than anything.
I have spent the last 2 days working in ColdBox and my impression is this.
I have been amazed at how much of an application I have built already in ColdBox. Actual business logic. Actual problem solving. Actual “this will make someone’s life easier, more efficient and productive”.
What’s changed? I didn’t build my own roles based security. I didn’t have to integrate internationalization. I didn’t have to extend a framework to do more (or less) than it did. ColdBox appears to be a framework that can be customized easily, or left alone and just run.
To potentially have the best of both worlds (Rapid dev of FuseBox and the scalability of OO-programing), compared to what was out there before, is more than a little staggering to this software architect. I don’t care to re-invent the wheel, I want to solve problems and help people that are forced to work with poor software.
Beyond learning the ins and outs of ColdBox, I am slowly realizing it’s feeling much like FuseBox did.. the next tool I will use for possibly a long time. Just like ColdFusion made web development power with ease, ColdBox takes Web application development to a similar of power with ease.
ColdBox allows you to leverage ColdFusion’s rapid application development in such an improved way that I don’t think has happened in several years. As much as Fusebox first came out for ColdFusion and then spread to PHP, etc., and pushed the bar so much, I think ColdBox will inspire as well.
What’s most impressive is that such a powerful framework has been kept, if I may, simple, relative to the complexity of everything it handles. That’s something ColdFusion did first, and better than anyone too.
In the coming few days I will start a Quickstart to ColdBox series to catch my first impressions and experiences of piecing it all together, to help you see for yourself what ColdBox could do for you.
- In: ColdBox| Coldfusion| Design
- Tags: ColdBox, Coldfusion