Schrade.Blog

Then no software would get written, but at least we wouldn't have any crap software...

My friend Jay posted two blog entries yesterday on the subject of raising the standard for programmers in our industry. I left a comment about it on his blog and talked with him about it on IM, but I figured I'd expand a bit on my thoughts on it here.

First things first, I completely disagree with him.

I don't think that 50% of programmers should leave the profession. I've worked on a lot of projects with a lot of different teams and I can't ever remember thinking "man, this project would be a lot easier if I got rid of half of this team."

I can also only think of few Net Negative Producing Programmers that I've worked with and most of them usually leave pretty quickly.

Most of the time, I've found that when a person isn't performing up to par, it's because of a management failure. I think that it's up to the development leads to analyze their teams and figure out how everyone can best contribute and make sure that people are performing at the top of their game.

Too often I've seen people fall into the trap of always being assigned to, or always choosing to work on, the easiest features in the project. They then do a half-assed job because they're always working on the boring part of the project and don't feel like a valued part of the team.

Maybe, for a change, we should assign those people the hardest part of the project for a few weeks. Sure, they might not so the best job, but they will work harder because, for once, what they're working on is challenging and exciting. Plus they know that the entire team is depending on them and is there to help them. That's how you bring people back into the fold and make them a productive, happy member of the team.

The point that's neglected in Jay's arguments is that experienced programmers shouldn't just be responsible for writing code. It should also be the job of experienced programmers to take those who are less experienced or interested and pull them up to our level.

Forcing them out of the profession is just as much of a failure on our part as it is on theirs.

Things sure have been quiet around here...

As some of you may already know, I've left the relative safety of my job at Collaborative Drug Discovery to have another go at starting a company.

I'm currently working with a friend to once again create something out of nothing and bring yet another crazy idea into the world. Therefore, if you see me and I look like I just got finished working for 18 hours straight, please buy me a beer and put me to bed.

As for the new company, I'm not ready to talk about what we're doing yet, but I'm sure that I'll be writing about it here as it comes together.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. - Steve Jobs

I was at a networking event out here in the Valley a few weeks ago where a bunch of companies went up on stage and presented their companies to the audience. I'm fairly certain that at least one of them might have been interesting, but to tell you the truth, I don't really know because I didn't really pay attention to any of them.

I already knew about the ones that mattered and a quick glance at the program showed me that the others weren't worth listening to because they were me too clones of other start-ups.

After the presentations were over, a friend asked me what I though of them, to which I replied, "Don't know, didn't pay attention" and he responded, "yeah, but are you actively a hater like me yet?"

I think that I got his point, and that is that there are times lately where I just want to slap people when they tell me what their company is doing.

I know that innovating is one of the hardest things in the world to do, but lately, I've been disappointed in 99% of what I see. As far as I can tell, there seem to be two main reasons for this:

1. The first reason is because of what I call the "me too" start-up. For example, when I first moved to SF, Flickr was the big thing out here, so for a few months everyone seemed to have a crap photo sharing site. Then this changed to Youtube/crap video sites, Facebook Platform/crap widget sites, and on and on. Some degree of competition is a good thing, but it's all a little much. If you have a substantial improvement to an existing product then, by all means, go for it. However, if you're just doing a feature for feature copy of a competitor's website then, please, invest those resources in doing something else. Or at least don't try to pitch it to me as something new and exciting.

2. The second reason, and the one that bothers me more, is the "aim high, fall fast" start-up. This is the start-up that has lofty goals, and falls into the trap of selling them out to meet some sort of smaller and less interesting short term target. This is all too common (hell, I did it at my last start-up), and I think that a big part of it comes from the fact that it's so cheap to start a company now that sometime it's easy to forget just how hard you really have to work to make something great. These are the companies that VCs need to fund at their "aim high" stage to keep them from plummeting. Sure, they might have an idea that's way off in left field, but companies like that are usually the ones that grow into something huge and interesting.

So, I guess that I'm asking everyone out there for one thing, and that is to think bigger than we are right now. Think outside the box, don't water it down in the early stages or once a little revenue starts to trickle in the door.

When I run into you at a networking event, make me say "damn, that's a crazy idea, but it just might work" and when I run into you 6 months later don't make me shake my head at you because you've turned it into a clone of another idea.

Perhaps if we all start using our heads, the innovation will start flowing freely once again.

If you weren't at Startup School this weekend or haven't watched DHH's speech yet, you should go check it out. It was entertaining and a good counter-point to much of the ridiculous talk that you hear out here in the Valley.

As I was watching it though, I had the same thought that I always seem to have when I hear someone from 37 Signals talk, and it came to me right when I saw the slide that said:

1. Great Application
2. Price
3. Profit!

If only it were that easy. The thing that these guys always leave out seems to be step 1.5:

Market the hell out of your product, and get a bunch of people to use it.

That step is really, really hard.

I bet that if you asked DHH if he thought that 37 Signals would be just as successful if he hadn't invented Rails, and without the flood of free publicity that that got them, and he answered truthfully, the answer would be "no".

There are probably all sorts of great applications out there that would help me out on a daily basis, but I have little to no time to try out most of them. I've tried out Basecamp though, simply because while learning Rails you hear again and again about how Rails was extracted from it.

Would I (or you) know anything about 37 Signals if it wasn't for Rails? Probably not.

Those guys do a great job of marketing themselves and getting things out in front of people, but just because you're having fun marketing your stuff, doesn't mean that marketing isn't work that you have to do.

If you think that you don't have to market your app, no matter how great it is, you're living in a world similar to the one that DHH had on one his final slides where he said:

500 * $40 = $125,000

That's right, an imaginary world.

For the last twelve years I've been building web applications. During that entire time I haven't ever worked at a software company that hasn't, at one time or another, been concerned with prematurely optimizing the application we've been working on.

I think that we can all learn an important lesson from this study of gym users that was recently written up in the Financial Times (via Paul Kedrosky).

Two Californian academics, Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, studied three US health clubs and discovered that 80 per cent of members used the gym so infrequently that they would have been better off paying the $10 fee for each individual visit. Many also left substantial gaps between their last visit and cancelling their membership.

This tracks well with my experience with subscription based software products. People inevitably sign up for more access than they need, and the difference between what they pay to use and what they actually use ends up going straight to your bottom line. Optimizing for expected usage never really pays off, because usage never lives up to expectations.

Also, get people on an auto-renew plan:

Some clubs attempt to limit the attrition rate by telephoning inactive members and asking whether there is anything the club can do for them. Mr Ratner never thought this was a good idea as it might remind them that they were wasting their money.

Lesson: People almost always use your software less then they, or you, expect. This is a good thing (for you, perhaps not so much for them).

Today marks the official beta launch of Triggit, the tech side of which is run by my friend Ryan Tecco (who co-founded Ten Ton Labs with me a few years ago).

So what's a Triggit? It's an easy way to insert images, videos, or text links into your blog, without downloading or installing any software.

All you have to do is add one line of code to your blogging software template. You can then use a cool Javascript based tool to insert objects into your blog on the fly. As you can see in the picture below, the Triggit interface just overlays itself on the top of your site to allow you to insert things:

You just select what type of object you want to insert and then drop it into the page wherever you want. For instance, I've used Triggit to insert this image, of Ryan dressed like a cow from Halloween a few years ago, into this post by searching for it on Flickr through their interface, and simply dropping it in below:

This is a game-changing sort of tool that will make your life as a blogger much easier. If anyone wants to try it out, I have 300 invite codes to the beta to hand out. Just use the access code 'kurt' when you sign up.

Update: More coverage at TechCrunch , GigaOm, and WebWare.

Dear Salesforce,

I've been doing some work with you lately, and I was hoping to hook into you using your APIs to automatically insert some of our leads. Unfortunately, I can't. Despite the fact that you have a full API, it seems that you've chosen to restrict API access to "Enterprise Edition" and higher level accounts, and at my office we only have a "Group Edition" account.

I've been trying to think of a good reason why you would do this. I'm doing my best to lock our small but growing business into using Salesforce. Why wouldn't you want that to happen? I'm trying to tie myself intimately into your infrastructure. I'm trying to make it impossible to extract myself from being your customer down the road, but you're thwarting my attempts at every turn.

Think of how it would increase my switching costs if something better comes along. I would have to tell whoever is pushing us to adopt the new application, "Sorry, if we switch we'll have re-engineer our app." It would set the bar much, much higher. Also, it would only help your case for sticking around if I could say "You know all of that cool stuff that our app does with Salesforce, it'll all be gone if we switch over."

So come on Salesforce, how about making both of our lives easier and opening things up. I'm sure that some high-up executive there is telling you that there are a bunch of good reasons not to. I'm here to tell you that that person is wrong. Open up and this relationship will be better for both of us.

Thanks in advance,

Kurt

A recent disturbing trend that I've noticed is that more and more programmers I run into seem to be really bad at math. At the very least, I'm starting to think that a few semesters of calculus in college wouldn't have hurt anyone.

Example 1:

Mint is a financial website that recently won first place at the Techcrunch 40 conference here in San Francisco. It aggregates your bank accounts and tells you how you can save money. While checking it out his evening I came across this, which, incidentally, is the same thing that it's been telling me since I signed up:

Come on Mint, this is the core feature of your website. (I'm not counting the account sign in and aggregation piece, as they seem to contract with Yodlee to do that.) How hard is it to properly calculate the above value?

I hate it when a startup spends so long on design that they forget to write solid code. People aren't going to come back if you can't even get this right.

Furthermore, check out the account that they want me to switch over:

Where did they even begin to pull these numbers from? They want me to switch an account with no money on it from a lower rate card to a higher rate card in order to save $278 a year.

At this point I've stopped thinking about math though, and starting thinking about all of the security holes that are probably in this site if they got something this fundamental wrong.

Unfortunately, there's no way in their interface to cancel my account. Wonderful:

These just seem like basic, basic things to me. I don't even know how you say that you're in beta when things like this don't work.

There are a ton of social networks out there nowadays, but how many of them are really useful?

I mean really useful. Useful in the sense of helping us to get our job done or making our lives easier.

Clearly, the vast majority of the social networks that we use on a day-to-day basis are little more than time sinks. Myspace and Facebooks are prime examples of this.

Twitter? Even worse.

The question remains then, how can we use the power of social networking to make our lives easier? How can we harness it to help us better do our jobs and manage our free time?

The company that I am currently involved in, Collaborative Drug Discovery, is trying to answer those questions, at least for the domain of drug discovery.

We take data from academic chemistry labs all over the world, some of it sitting in dusty old lab notebooks, forgotten for years; and feed it into our system. This data can then be shared with all of the other researchers in the system.

Suddenly all of these researchers have access to exponentially more data then they had before, as well as the means to search and explore it.

Take just a minute and imagine the possibilities of that.

As an example, say a researcher in Poland finds a chemical that slows the growth of a certain type of cancer. They put it into the CDD system and then find 10 other similar chemicals that have already been studied by researchers from all over the world. If one of those chemicals has already been tested in humans and proven safe for other uses, the researcher might be able to head directly to human testing for effectiveness against the cancer that she found it worked against. This is a stage in the drug discovery process that usually takes many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get to. We've just routed around it, all thanks to the power of social networking and data sharing.

Millions of dollars and years of people's lives were saves

And just possibly, and most importantly, hundreds of lives might have been saved in the process.

That's our vision, and I'm excited to be a part of it.

When I was starting my first company and moving out to San Francisco a year and a half ago, I remember attending one of the first meetings of SFWIN. I took place in the backroom of a sushi place and had about 20 or 30 people at it. Everyone there was an entrepreneur first and foremost, but I remember the meeting having a distinctly geeky feel about it.

Fast forward to the present day, and the geeks are pretty much gone. I've been to a ton of networking events since that first one, and I've watched them fill up with more and more suits (and a bunch of geeks, me included, turn more and more into suits). This is good, as it means that there's lots of money floating around the Valley right now, and it has helped me learn a ton about business since those early days, but there isn't really anyplace anymore that has that geeky edge to it.

It looks like someone is finally taking steps to change all of that. I got an e-mail today from Christian Perry of SF Beta announcing geekSessions, a new networking event in the SF area that tries to inject a bit of the geek back into things. It's not quite in the back room of a sushi place anymore, but hey, we're all used to spending our time at throwing down drinks at 111 Minna now, so I guess the upgrade was inevitable.

Sounds like a great idea to me.