As it happens, BlogDay(tm) 2007 has very strict 5 rules about how to do this thing. Anyway, we here at Tech IT Easy are not that good at following any rules and anyway, who are they to tell us how to do this thing. Blogs are about decentralized individual empowerment, not following a centralized bureaucratic system! Earlier today, Vince already wrote about his 5 blogs and now its my turn to give you 5 other blogs.

While Vince’s selections probably reflected the blogs that might somewhat be blogs that are in the Tech IT Easy’s scope, my 5 blogs for you today, are my personal choices. They are not new and they are pretty famous, but not that famous as blogs. Furthermore, selecting five was a really hard task for me, as I only follow regularly 28 feeds and roughly two thirds of them are what someone might call blogs, rest are news feeds. I totally agree that what the founder of 3l0g Day-thingie says, “Did you know that the majority of blog readers read a very small number of top blogs?”. I know I do.

Anyway, here we go, in no particular order.

Double Fine Action News – Not so much a blog, but a place for Tim Schafer to ramble in a a disguise of a company’s news page. Tim Schafer, of course, is the evil genius behind the amazing game Psychonauts and one of the evil geniuses behind many LucasArts’ famous adventure games. I would gladly donate my left kidney for Tim, even if he didn’t need it, for making Grim Fandango. For this accomplishment and others, he’s duly categorised in Wikipedia as one of the lucky few “Living people“.

Grumpy Gamer – Now, this blog is anti-new in the drunkenblog sense, the latest post is from April. But it’s written by Ron Gilbert and there are some pretty odd links in the sidebar. In Wikipedia, he’s categorised unceremoniously to “Year of birth missing“.

Reddit all? – A blog by the guy who draws the little aliens for reddit.com, the social news or something-along-the-lines site. Posts only occasionally have anything to do with reddit.com or the alien. But there are cuttlefish.

Call Me Fishmeal. – by Wil Shipley, who loves and loves to write and loves to write about mac software. Right now he’s somewhat silent, because while he usually writes about “pimping up code”, he can’t as the new, and according to him, cool frameworks in Mac OS X 10.5 are still under NDAs. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t write about TED conferences or cars with unpainted carbon fiber body. He also has an arch-nemesis, whose blog just didn’t make the cut this year.

Releaselog – Now, this site is a a bit different as its about the warez scene and usually just posts info about recent releases to the underground tubes of the interwebs. Once in a while, though, there are good posts about the whole warez/copyright/p2p-discussion combined with occasional scene drama.

Seriously, there’s no way I could’ve tried to follow the rule 2 of BlogDay Club (“you don’t talk about..”). I can’t be connected with what current laws define as illegal or in couple of cases abobe, the guys are freaking famous and I’m just a fan of their amazing work. In a way I really enjoy that they blog, because it shows that they’re just people, it’s nice to see what makes them tick – what are their interests, and it’s great that they can express their ideas not only through their work. Before you would’ve have needed to run to some conferences or hunt down magazine’s with interviews about these guys.

So, happy BlogDay, whatever that means to you in these undefined web2.0 days.

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Hello everybody,

Today is blog-day, the day we geeks celebrate the new digital age, where every word, thought, sight, and sound is digitised and broadcast to millions of households. So what blogs to we love? After some intense debate (not), and in no particular order, here are five blogs that I would like to extend the digital roses too:

New Music Strategies

Artists face challenging times with the internet and the consequences it has had on the valuations and consumption of music. Andrew Dubber helps navigate this confusing world, and does so in a human, personable way. I would especially advise people to check out his manifesto, which he published in the form of a free ebook.

T.L.L.T. – Things That Look Like Things

The world needs more people like Christian Ceres Merry, who through some weird mental twists and turns always manages to find pictures on Flickr that blow me away.

Fortuito.us

Matthew Haughey, the founder of the infamous MetaFilter, has to update his blog more often. I would just like to make that a public statement. However, the few blogposts he did write (5 I think) are all digital gold.

Start-up Review

Nisan Gabbay, founder of SUR, and the other well-esteemed bloggers are creating a public service for everyone with their case-study-styled blog on today’s web-start-ups. They, to me, represent all the potential that new media can have and I hope we can someday follow in their example. [/end gush]

And last, but not least!

Paleo-Future

Another quirky blog, one that reminds us of futures that never were and the infinite potential that our minds have.  The author, Matt ??, has an amazing eye for this kind of content and I’m always wondering what he will uncover next.

So, that’s it! I sincerely hope you liked it! While these blogs may be very diverse in nature, they represent the limitless potential of user-generated content, simple creativity, and altruism (edit: typo). 

Please, feel free to suggest other blogs you have enjoyed in the comments. I’m sure the blog-authors will appreciate it!

Your dedicated Tech IT Easy team!

Some last minute maintenance for 3l0g day: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and http://www.blogday.org/. I will also notify the authors that didn’t comment yet about their “nomination.”

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There has been a good deal of literature on the recent subprime mortgage financial so-called crisis. I haven’t seen anything related to the impact of this downturn on the high tech industry. Let’s hence cross the chasm and write a brief note about it.

In short and broadly speaking, what the subprime lending crunch is all about:

Not-so-professional professional lenders like NovaStar & New Century Financial grant mortgages to low-revenue borrowers; interest rates pick up and so does the debt burden, from a low-revenue borrower view point; so, low-revenue borrowers can’t actually refinance the interests of their debt, which means they have to sell their property. But since a large number of low-revenue borrowers act the same way and the real estate market shows uncertainties, estate prices go down, which urges potential buyers to wait longer, and refrains borrowers to refinance their debt, and so on and so forth. At the end of the day, this year’s subprime credit crunch looks a lot alike what happened in Japan in 1993, although and fortunately at a much lower scale: mortage lenders limited partners (mainly financial institutions: banks or insurance companies) as for a due subprime lenders can’t refinance because their low-revenue borrowers are having a hard time making both ends meet. Henceforth, subprime lenders are stated insolvent and go bust, their assets being redistributed to their lenders, and the remaining to their accounts payable & shareholders. It goes without saying that the last ones to get their money back, namely the shareholders, usually don’t get it all back (this is A)… Meanwhile, financial institutions from all over the world have invested, on behalf of their in subprime securities, supposed to be zero-risk investments. However, it appears these zero-risk investments happen to be very risky (this is B). A + B = generalized lost of confidence in financial markets that central banks try to diminish by printing dollar bills aimed at making sure local financial institutions, which have invested their clients’ money at zero-risk rates, don’t fall; scapegoats nominated: debt / risk rating agencies like S&P, Fitch, Moodies (the usual suspects); increased volatility due to higher sensitiveness to macroeconomic perspectives.

Nothing so bad after all. Everybody knew there would be a downturn at some point. The point is that nobody knew how bad it would turn out to be, and when it would occur.

Impact of subprime crunch on the Software industry:

R&D budget cuts: this is typical everytime there’s a downturn: large corporations cut R&D budgets (which I find dumb since downturns are excellent times for innovation and fostering one’s competitive advantage through information systems; but well, I’m not in charge here). End result: software sales aimed at R&D departments (eg. Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA) are likely to suffer temporarily.

Online Advertising. Well, let’s not beat around the bush: what about Google? My call: any crisis can only be positive for Google; offline commercials are harder to track. Through online advertising, you get to gather scientific ROI metrics, and benefit from increased accountability, flexibility, reactivity. A crisis can only accelerate the shift from offline advertising to online ads. It would be a good time for Microsoft to launch its AdCenter platform. Advertisers are dying to be able to choose between Google (which has become pretty expensive being alone over years) and something else than Yahoo! Overture. By the way, Criteo is soon to release Criteo Ads worldwide (only available in Beta and in French as of today) as an alternative to Google.

US subprime crunch will necessarily benefit independent software vendor SideTrade, a net working capital killer SaaS company (reduced net working capital increases free cash flows and accelerates debt refinancing – which is always a smart move when interest rates go up).

• US subprime crunch will also benefit procurement management software (for cost control reasons obviously).

• The subprime crisis will have no impact on retail (people will still need to eat and buy consumable &/or perishable goods), storage investments, and security solutions.

• Telco-related software technologies potentially driving cost killing (like VoIP systems: remember Skype is software, not telco) will regain interest from corporate buyers and CIO since negotiations are likely to get tougher with mobile and land line fleet vendors.

• CRM and BI / Datamining shouldn’t suffer from the downturn since it is generally agreed that it costs more to acquire a new client than to keep existing customers.

Impact on subprime crunch on IT consulting:

Severe shortcuts are expected in IT consulting, especially in banking / insurance where uncertainties are likely to remain higher for a short period of time (a few months). Such redundancies will have a positive impact on the software industry where finding skilled developers has become nothing less than a nightmare. Last and not least, the subprime crunch is very likely to accelerate the ongoing IT & BPO offshoring trend.

Impact on Venture Capital:

On the one hand, venture capitalists may suffer from limited partners (financial institutions in general + wealthy individuals and families) appearing less eager to increase VC-managed funds. On the other hand, venture capitalists invest in private equity that isn’t correlated with either the fixed income market (high tech startups never raise debt).

So what, is that a draw? Not quite. My call is that the VC market will suffer if stockmarket indexes remain low. The reason I believe so is that IPO opportunities will result dampered for a mid-term time frame.

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It’s an honor for me to introduce as a blogger on Tech IT Easy one of the best photo editing amateurs ever, and a star on the Flickr community: Emmanuel Perez-Duarte. Check his works of Art here. Faithful readers of Tech IT Easy had already read about Emmanuel here in a post dedicated to the e-commerce long tail.

A true geek user, as opposed to geek developer, Manu has always been an early adopter of software related to digital content: photo editing, music, videos; in short, Emmanuel is fond of all sorts of multimedia experiences and software dealing with it.

His favourite? GIMP of course. Emmanuel will try within his next 100 years as a blogger on Tech IT Easy to publish some tutorials about how to use GIMP (see review in French on Olivier Ezratty’s blog here). Manu also enjoys the spirit of the ‘open source community’ and open source software in general: so I’ll be glad to fight a little bit with him when he raises such issues.

Emmanuel also happens to be a very good friend of mine. Until recently, we were listed as ‘married’ on Facebook. But Emmanuel dumped me for unknown reasons.

When he isn’t on his computer, playing the piano, or using his digital camera, Emmanuel is an auditor at Renault, from where he’ll try to bring some industrial-geekiness to Tech IT Easy; before that, he was an economist in Paris @ Exane BNP-Paribas, where he covered Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Latin America – bringing some more geographical expertise here. Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, like a number of bloggers on Tech IT Easy, just graduated from HEC Paris with a Master in Management Science specialized in economics.

We hope he enjoys being part of the adventure and wish him to have fun. Welcome to you Manu! I’m so glad to have you blogging with us.

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The browser market is looking a bit confused right now, with “true web” on smartphones and IE7 strenghtening IE’s dominance of web and other players shuffling around. All while Google hands money to all for having that search box there in the toolbar.

The next major version of Firefox, 3.0, will probably be released somewhere around November. Jeremy wrote about Firefox’s first alpha back in April here, where he pointed out some of its promised killer-features. The tech world changes quickly and now it seems that it’s the Firefox team that should watch out for the competitors.

In my opinion, Firefox 2.0 was a big let-down compared to 1.5, which was full of potential. The release of IE7 didn’t make things any easier - while still inferior, IE7 is almost “good enough”. The news that of those, who download Firefox, 50% don’t even try it and of the rest, 75% don’t stay on Firefox? Still, Firefox seems to be gaining some ground in some countries, f.e. having a respectable 45,4% market share in Finland (making Finland #2 adopter after Slovakia’s 47,9%) (Netherlands on the other hand is trailing last with 14,6%).

But, focusing on these numbers sounds like major change from the Firefox of yesterday, the rebel browser. Since when did Firefox’s goal change from making a good product to getting a higher market share? In my opinion, these tactics start to sound more evil and more like, well, Microsoft. Is Firefox getting too arrogant? Is the focus on dumbing down the browser for the masses affecting the project? With Firefox going for volume, the other players (except for IE, which needs to do nothing) are going for niches, like Opera is doing. This would seem to put Apple’s Safari between rock and a hard place. I mean, what’s Apple after with Safari’s Windows version?

Safari on Windows wasn’t the only surprise from Apple to the crowded browser market. It seems that practically out of nowhere, Apple’s open-sourced WebKit framework is becoming more and more popular where Firefox’s Gecko used to. First, WebKit came back to its roots after KDE decided to “unfork” WebKit and KHTML. Other notable players joined the WebKit lovefest as Nokia has used WebKit for a while on its mobile browsers and now even the guys at OLPC are planning to ditch Gecko in favour of less resource-intensive WebKit. I think this is a good example of what open-source is about, but not in the traditional sense (freedom). In my opinion that the power of open-source lies in the trend of abandoning the DIY-principle, which is deeply trenched in the traditional software engineering. There should be no reason to reinvent an inferior wheel.

Of course, Safari for Windows will probably stay as a niche product, but in course, Apple has pushed yet another framework on Windows ecosystem (QuickTime and Bonjour being other examples). On desktop Linux side, things get more interesting. Because WebKit is “just” a rendering engine, the developers of KDE and others can avoid another Firefox/IceWeasel-drama and yet get solid engine that’s gaining serious clout on the browser market. There are plans to make WebKit for Linux through Qt, for example. The day when you can download a plugin for Firefox to render pages instead with WebKit (like you can use IE’s renderer on Windows) are getting nearer. Is this a good sign for Firefox?

That WebKit seems to be more and more favoured in mobile and other low resource environments, like the OLPC, is something the developers are probably really proud about. This also pits it against Opera, who has tried to make a market by developing its browser for mobile phones (Opera Mobile and Mini ) and others, notably Wii. Of course, Opera offers a solid product for its markets, while WebKit is meant for developers. Of course, being a framework, WebKit doesn’t have to worry about what its icon label says and can so focus on things that really matter, like security and web standards.

Remember that tabbed browsing, pop-up blockers and rss readers have very little to do with the renderer and are just parts of the browser software. This means that while the current business model of search box revenue in Firefox, Opera and Safari seems to be viable solution for browsers, there’s no such thing for open-source framework. This is a real threat to Firefox’s future and also the reason why IE6’s legacy will ruin web experience for years to come. It’s really hard to justify investment into something that’s not visible and means very little to the end-user, who in IE’s and Firefox’s case are their users. So, why does Apple care?

This is something that I think is great about open source license and how they are not really “free”. By forking KHTML, Apple could rapidly build up a browser that was up to the web standards of its day and not reinvent a whell, but they could focus on what Apple is good at, designing the application. While they could get their hands on the code for free, it came with a cost, which was that they had to share their modifications to the world as KHTML is licensed under LGPL. Now that iPhone is out of the door and it too uses WebKit, it’s easy to see why Apple worked to make the engine as smooth and light as possible. As a side effect, other organizations interested in light browser framework adopted the code. WebKit’s open-sourceness and features are not driven by Apple’s good-will, but it’s features align with it’s own needs and by license-necessity it needs to redistribute the source. Of course, it can be argued that Apple goes a little bit further than expected by the license only, but still, it’s good keep in mind that corporations (not even Apple) are by definition only interested in their shareholder value.

Take for example Google’s open source manager, who said at a recent conference, ”We have enough engineering resources that, if the license has obligations we are not interested in, we can just not use it”. It’s a safe bet to say that KTHML’s license was something that suited Apple. The only upside for Apple for others adopting WebKit is the possibility that wider market reach equals to more websites that are coded so that Safari shows the correctly. While this is good for Safari’s users, I don’t think it’s any major concern for Apple – Safari is, after all, just the browser that ships with Mac OS X and the only profit-incentive are Google’s search revenues, by a long shot not an important source for Apple’s profits (unlike for Opera and especially for Mozilla Corp.).

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Sprinting the stories

Scrum and XP from the trench describes how Scrum has been used to apply some Agile project team management methods on real life projects. Henrik Kniberg modestly describes this as a paper while it actually happens to be, well, an excellent practical guide.

The specific jargon may make it a bit slightly difficult to dive into, though. Sprint, scrum master, stories, when iteration, project leader or use cases could have done the trick. This could result in having the author sounding like some kind of sectarian, at least for the first 10 or 20 pages.

However, regardless of the actual Scrum radical approach, the project and people management tips in this book make it a definite must read to whoever is interested in these area of professional software development .

10 lessons in Project Management

The first half of the book mostly describes a Sprint (iteration). 10 brilliant project management tips bubble up from this description :

1. Complete transparency on the projet. All people in the team have clear tasks assigned to them, and everybody knows who is doing what, what are the objectives and dependencies.
2. Cost estimates are carried out by developers. I’m sure you fellow developers know how terrible that is to meet estimates and deadlines a manager (a technical one if you’re lucky) commited to. Having developers estimating their work (as long as you can challenge them) makes everybody comfortable.
3. Never ever compromise on quality to add more stories in a sprint. Rather have less stories.
4. Seat the whole team together
5. 15 mins daily status meeting. Hard time for procrastinators ahead …
6. Always end up the Sprint with a demo. So many reasons : it motivates the team, you can communicate more easily on what you’ve been doing, and hey ! you have to have something working !
7. My favorite one : the large taskboard to track the Sprint progress. No fancy colorful excel sheet that no one bar the managers can understand or even bother go through : just a board with colorful stickers for tasks and the Burndown graph. Instant view of the progress, daily updated, always accessible.
8. Keep the managers at bay
9. Post Sprint retrospective. This helps finding out what could have be done better, validate the initial estimates, the velocity, have the team to talk to provide feedback, etc …
10. All meetings are time boxed.

Applying XP with relunctant people

An interesting section of the paper talks more about how Scrum (team organisation) fits nicely with XP (programming methodology), going with the following main eXtreme Programming features.

These are : Pair programming, Test Driven Development, Incremental design (no need to over design at the early stages of the project), Continuous integration, collective code ownership, fighting overtime which eventually happens to be counterproductive, etc …

This is another story to apply these. In particular Pair Programming.

Here comes the other main quality of this book : suggesting different ways of dealing with people to put in place such controversial practices, especially when the most relunctanct people are the ones that never actually experienced those practices.

Each time Henrik describes different situations with different type of oppositions from the developers and suggest an appropriate way of dealing with it. This smooth, clever, thoughtful and yet assertive approach definitely are (from my experience) the most efficient and the less frustrating ones, from both perspectives.

It’s free

And that’s not the only reason why it’s worth having : this is an excellent book, fun and easy to read : strongly recommended if you’re interested in project management methodologies, even if you dont plan to apply such radical technique as Scrum.

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Bon appêtit.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dr5zAOc7-0]

Steve, too tired to post anything consistent tonight, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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Since a few years, a couple of websites have provided Internet users with the ability to sketch their genealogy online, very much like some of you must have already tried with conventional desktop software (such as Family Tree Maker, or for Mac users, Mac Genealogie).

Nonetheless, these services, be it MyFamily, GeneaNet or Ancestry.com (the latter two being the most successful of the lot) have not had a considerable impact for now.

This was until Geni came. Geni, created by some of the founders of PayPal and eBay, provides a new viral approach to the old online genealogy concept, in line with the now famous Web 2.0 trend.

Basically, its specificity is to add a “social networking” flavour to the traditional, plain vanilla genealogy web services, besides being quite user-friendly. People you define in your tree can be identified through their email addresses. This will encourage non-members to register (at no charge) to Geni, joining officially your tree and completing it themseves: viral growth, once again. Obviously a powerful search engine allows you to browse through all profiles, and contact the ones you’re interested in (your family, I guess), through their emails.

You will certainly discover a number of relatives you have lost contact with, while parsing the trees. And thanks to the email adresses provided, if and only if you are a member of someone’s tree, you’ll be able to get back in touch with those people, very much like other social networking websites. Ultimately, and although the feature isn’t implemented as of today, the trees of any members will be potentially connected to each other – once again, with the agreement of tree managers – thus allowing Geni to recreate the genealogy of mankind ! Geni already displays a stunning 5-million large profile data base, along with a much smaller user-base ; which is still very nice for a website which has been in the market for less than 6 months… I am not sure whether this is the fastest viral growth rate of the Web 2.0 or not, but this definitely remains impressive.

At this point I shall make two comments:

1) Obviously, for me, the request “Steve Danino” could only display my profile (although, wait, according to Google I’ve got apparently a homonym, who won a couple of poker tournaments. Great). But what about Mr Michael Jones in the U.S., Mr Zhang in China, Mr. Jean Martin in France ? I suggest that finding a way through the thousands of homonyms will be a nightmare if further information (such as location, age, etc…) is not filled in. Since these fields are not required to be completed by Geni, we should expect a nice mess in the end.

2) One cannot spend its life registering on social networking services, and browsing them. Although I know a couple of freaks addicted to basically all these services, this will not be the case of the majority of humans. So here’s my suggestion: a leading, advanced social network – say MySpace, Friendster, Plaxo, or Facebook, in which faithful readers of Tech IT Easy will now find a dedicated group – should take control of Geni before it grows too fast. There are a number of rationales for connecting the two underlying concepts. (Let’s take aside privacy issues, although a family tree should surely remain private, or at least reserved to close relatives).

i) I suppose anybody would like to add automatically all the family members to its contact lists, albeit with a number of restrictions. After all, I personnally use Facebook mostly as an online address book, and one should always possess the contact details of its family members.

ii) Furthermore the ability to visualize relationships also proves useful, while it is both useless and unmanageable when it comes to friends – you have got 300 so-called friends on Facebook, right ? But then

iii) it is even more useful if you can access to further information about your relatives, such as the overloaded profile pages of social networks. Something nobody would like to replicate on Geni in its actual form, because no one wants to get pissed off twice…not mentioning the fact that with a 1:20 active user base/profile base ratio, such effort will appear pointless. And finally,

iv) although fully detailing profiles of deceased persons sounds like a bad idea, a short description of your ancestors provided by members of your family tree, will surely appeal to many, all the more since you can leave open messages to them, in their defunct walls.

To say it in a nutshell : I cannot see very well for now how to integrate such different services, but I guess I would be interested by a family tree-centered subnetwork (Geni) amongst a wider network (Facebook, Friendster et al.).

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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A few weeks ago, Tech IT Easy has switched from its previous URL (http://www.jeremyfain.net or http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com) to the current one (http://www.techiteasy.org), thus acknowledging the fact that the very nature of this blog has dramatically shifted – previously a personal blog with occasional outside contributions, now a truly collective blog, capitalizing on our original “out-of-the-box” approach and our diverse and complementary blogger profiles. This, besides, was perfectly in line with Jeremy’s expectations, back in January 2007, when I was first approached to participate to Tech IT Easy.

So far so good. But in the process, we partly lost something we were dearly attached to: our Web rankings. Our traffic is still largely satisfying for our egos (having slightly decreased though), our reader base keeps expanding steadily, and posts tend to be more and more commented. However I personnally still find unsatisfactory our visibility through search engines, at least in comparison of what it was before the migration. More precisely, the numerous trackbacks (featured on a variety of blogs, the ones of regular readers – O. Ezratty, Joseph Cargo, etc… – as well as more exotic ones) helped us reach a significant ranking: now, these trackbacks are inoperant. The blogposts which were all highly visible have now been discarded by Google, which should not come as a surprise since their URLs are now obsolete. Nonetheless, a majority of them have not yet “recovered” and been restored through their new address. So I will ask two simple questions :

1) How on Earth are we meant to operate (through Wordpress or whatever) in order to restore the visibility of all the previous posts in search engines, now that they have a different URL ? Is there any way to do so, except waiting for Mr. Google, Yahoo and Live Search – OK, just kidding, this was just to please Jeremy – to crawl the integrality of the blog once again ?

2) Would new, up-to-date trackbacks help us to get to this point faster ? If so, shall we ask our fellow bloggers to update their trackbacks – and if we do so, will they fulfill our demands ? Or should we just strive to provide ever more better posts, in order to obtain further recognition, something we should do anyway ?

Thank you for your insights. SEO specialists are a rare species, since it implies evolving as fast as Google, which is non trivial.

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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It’s an open group so feel free to join. The menu says: dog food, feedbacks, fun, suggestions, insults, free lunch, events, teasers, and..dating?

It’s all there: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4767374865

My call: the FB group will replace the blog in the long run…not!

Vincent’s edit: Just a reminder to people who don’t use or want to join Facebook, you can always give us feedback at our new email-address: techiteasyblog@gmail.com

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I actually learnt what software architecture means something like 9 months – when Jean-Sébastien and Pierre discussed the architecture of CartoReso and I was listening, eyes wide opened not understanding the slightest bit of what was going on. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize how crucial designing a smart and robust architecture is in making the implementation of a software product strategy successful though.

This being said, there’s a number of things one should know when it comes to software architecture design applied to an entrepreneurial context. I acknowledge I’m brand new to this domain, but software architecture has been the one thing I’ve been focusing on in the last 4 months: the sun could rise without me having read at least a few pages on the topic. So, here are my 11 non-technical takeaways. There you go:

1. Think strategy, not technology. Strange? Maybe. The goal of software architecture is to embed you strategy into your product. Keep that in mind. And keep strategic analysis informal: week-long brainstorms between founders will perfectly do. Keeping the strategic analysis informal shouldn’t prevent you from going the extra mile digging deep though. Be tough-as-nails, cold-blooded and if necessary, surround yourself with razor-sharp, nit picky colleagues that will pinpoint what deserves to be pinpointed
2. Think intellectual property, especially if you’re small and weak. You don’t want the big guys to steal from you. Ooosh, I was almost forgetting. See this pizza-and-coke Linux guy in your team unwilling to think of patents as anything else than evil? Yeah, I know, he’s smart, nope, very smart and you don’t want to argue with him. But fight him with words until he understands intellectual property is key in a knowledge warfare industry where some countries (like China) are more equal than others when it comes to IP. The guy’s smart so it will take a lot less time than you expect as of now.
3. Think interface and user experience first, also called Think take your time. Don’t start coding from day one. What you should do is draw the screens of your applications. Each screen. With all the buttons, everything. Think of the human – machine interface first. Paradoxically, the longer you’ll wait, the faster you’ll get it done. Procrastinate. Do actually your best in procrastinating. You’d better walk slow in the right direction than run fast in a dead end. Unfortunately, true geeks can’t help coding. So refrain them from doing so by all means – including, if necessary, use violence and blackmail their families.
4. Think world-class engineers, or don’t think – or even think of thinking ever. Pick up the best – and trust me that’s easier to say than do. One smart develop does the work of ten lame programmers so do it, whatever it takes. And give out stock options, be generous about it: startup developers jump from one failed startup to another. Finding for once a good horse to ride is a rare, unique opportunity to make a home run and stop worrying about money for a while. These guys are the ones who deserve it most.
5. Think division of labour. Software architecture helps you parallelize the work load between developers to make all different groups working on all different parts finish on the same date. Believe me, there’s nothing more beautiful than assembling parts of code processed by different brains, clicking on ‘compile’, and see it run. However, do not believe you can then take a nap: the hardest thing in software isn’t to have a program that compiles properly. I would tend to say the hardest bit lies in packaging your software (never did it so I should just stop here). You’ll come up first with a broad drawing of the different software layers depending on the number of floors of your software (eg data / infrastructure; application; presentation – the SOA trend tends to divide the application layer into two, technical and a functional, subcomponents) – which ease work breakdown structuring. For instance, those with some good taste (or the least bad taste) will deal with the interface, others with the client side, the remaining ones will work on the server side. As an example, in CartoReso, Jean-Sébastien dealt with lower layers hacked in C (he was the most knowledgeable in NMap, the open source brick on which we decided to build on), Pierre with the application engine and with integration / build / project management (since he was in charge of the middle layer) and my humble self with the interface. But a broad drawing isn’t enough. You may then decide to fine tune your architecture and delve into the details of each layer. This work is necessary when dealing with large software development teams: regression risk finds itself lowered when everyone knows what it has to do and each method is clearly owned by a lead someone.
6. Think flexibility. Lay the groundwork for future evolutions: you’re not building a software for today or even tomorrow. Think long term. A fashionable way of implementing flexible architectures is to go for modularity – like Dassault Systems does: you don’t acquire one standard piece of software, you just build your own DS software by picking the modules you need in their catalog. Interestingly enough, Dassault Systems‘ pricing catalog follows the way the architecture was thought, hence creating a perfect alignment between marketing and engineering which I believe is an industry best practice. Why? Well, Dassault Systems happens to fulfill the dream of all software vendors: it sells generic software that matches specific needs.
7. Think lock-in. The new release of Firefox sucks: it crashes thrice a day and every time I try to download something. so I’ve decided to drop it for Safari on my Vista Mac at home and IE7 on my Vista laptop at work. But I find it REALLY hard, as I loved these little del.icio.us taggers or icons to subscribe to RSS readers embedded in the URL bar. Firefox has achieved to lock me in (well, not quite, but so far it did): the number of available plug ins prevent me from dropping Firefox until I find a solution (FYI, there exists IE7 plugins on windowsmarketplace.com). Lock-in has long been the one major issue with Google: it is now solved since Google login eases access to other Google web applications via Ajax menus. The powerful lock-in strategy execution usually reflects the value of the underlying platform – and the value of a platform equals the value of its ecosystem.
8. Think proprietary control of a widespread standard Look at Adobe Acrobat’s .pdf format, or Microsoft Office applications (used to be .doc, .ppt and .xls, and now, with Open XML, it’s .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx). Once you’ve set the standard, the value of your software increases dramatically because it takes long for an installed base to migrate to a new standard. This simple phenomenon is called inertia. The hardest bit here is to become the standard. Which can be achievved running faster than everyone and remain in stealth mode (invisible from the big ones) as long as possible. Easier said than done.
9. Think competition. Don’t mess with large corporations. If they are after you before you’ve proved your architecture is hard to replicate, they’ll make an announcement stating they’re soon to release a similar software, which will slower sales for your software, and come up, probably a little late, with something similar and sell at a loss, which will inevitably kill you. If your architecture is strong, elegant and patented, then the big one will realize it costs a lot to replicate (developers, patent breaking risk, time frame, etc.) and will think of acquiring either you or one of your competitors. This is how big corporations now innovate and trust me, software architecture audits aren’t piece of cake. Should they choose to acquire a serious competitor, sell your company before you get to die. Indeed, once the big one has the same product as you do and i) you’re alone, independent and weak; ii) you haven’t set the standard yet, the usual path followed to reap you off the map is that it will sell a similar product to yours for cheap, probably at a loss, if not for free – and the only thing you can do to compete is do the same too. Right? But think twice: your software product is your only cash cow whilst the big one on the other side of the river generates revenues from a large product portfolio. You’ll henceforth die before your large competitor does, no matter how much money you’ve raised.
10. Think first things first: your project needs an architecture too. “Right” order is: 0) idea + slideware demo 1) quirky demo for funding + recruitment purpose that you’ll throw away as soon as you’ll get seed funding + recruitment + strategic analysis 2) seed funding (angels) + software architecture 3) functional specs + user interface design + feasibility + technical requirements + development schedule 4) prototype started all over again from scratch 5) series A + refined proto + then start the marketing machine (road map, channel, trade shows, PR, buzz, and all that jazz), hand it to the CEO and prepare for release crunch time: documentation, support, help, manufacturing, shipping, etc.. Don’t worry though, things never happen as such. Expect the unexpected: the story never ends up as planned in the scenario.
11. Think interoperability: since you can choose, choose the most appealing role of the play: the white knight. In order to play White Knight, you need to look like a honest broker, even though you’re not. Think of Firefox’s ‘we’re gonna free the web from Microsoft’-approach: they run on all major platforms, support a massive number of external applications (like iGraal) as a platform, is translated in a number of languages by a community, etc. and at the end of the day, Mozilla makes 60 million dollars per year, whilst Google makes much, much more (Mozilla runs Google as a default search engine), and locks you in with little apps like del.icio.us tagger. So, to recapitulate Mozilla Firefox’s set of best practices (I should say right here that Microsoft is very good to at implementing such strategies, I can answer questions on this if you like), your product should be multi platform (start with Windows (90% installed base is convincing enough), then move to Mac OS, then move to Linux), be multi language-ready (it’s not so complicated to support Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian unless you think about it afterwards, and then it’s a nightmare), and opened to external developers through a game of APIs: it will generate a buzz, make your company look sexier and hence ease new hires, and last but not least create value on your software by developing what you don’t have time to develop yourself. If you can use freeware code, do it; if you can purchase code for flat fees, do it; don’t pay flat royalties for source code down (eg US$ 15 per product sold), go for pay-per-deployment revenue % royalties instead – ie 1% of unit price; too risky. Make sure you don’t start depending on a partner though: don’t get locked-in yourself. At the end of the day, a good interoperability execution of strategy will strengthen your bargaining position with potential partners who will then realize you have the ability to choose to support them, or not. And then you’re the one calling the shots.
12. Think robustness. Like Criteo, software with crème-de-la-crème architectures never break because of the load (the post, in French, I’m pointing to basically says their full .NET software resisted torture)

Expect a bunch of technical takeaways this time as soon as I feel ready for it.

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Jérémy suggested that I describe my different experiences as a software developer in a set of articles, and I found this approach really interesting. I will start here with my first big experience as a developer during my company creation, and then I will continue with the different projects I’ve realized in my current company. I apologize in advance for not being able of giving some deep details sometimes, as confidentiality matters prevent me from doing this.

Two years ago, Fidji and I decided to launch a company “BlogEntreprise” (now discontinued). The project was to develop a professional blog portal for companies and associations. Instead of using existing tools, we decided to develop our website entirely by ourselves to offer the best personalization tools. The website had two different parts:

              – A professional blog search engine 

              - A personal space to create and manage your professional blog

• Languages and DBMS used :

I was the developer and it was my first real experience of web development. In three months I have developed a website using three different languages.

              - HTML: the basic language for all web applications.

              - JavaScript: it was principally to control that all forms were filled correctly.

              – PHP: I’ve chosen it because it’s the best free language to use with MySQL and because it’s both a procedural programming language and an object-oriented one.

As I said before, for the database management system (DBMS) I have chosen MySQL for two main reasons: it’s free and it’s a powerful tool when used with PHP.

• Strong focus on the analysis stage

In order to develop the website more easily, I took a lot of time to build my entity-relationship model. For those who don’t know it, an entity-relationship model is used to describe the structure of your database and the relationships between different tables.

I think that having a good entity-relationship model is crucial to have a strong database: it is a basic for software developers to dedicate a lot of time to think about it as it eases dramatically the rest of the development process.

• Main issues

The most difficult part of this project was to combine the technical and the design aspect. With languages like PHP it’s not easy to separate the design part from the technical part as they are mixed in all files. Conceptually it is really difficult to know where to start: a website conceived by adapting the technical development to the design might be really different from one conceived with the technical part coming first. In that case it’s often a problem of competencies: as I’m not at all a web designer, I had a tendency to think to the technical part first, and then to adjust the design.

Besides I developed this website in parallel of my studies during nights and week-ends, so I didn’t have a lot of time and I tried to focus on the technical part to get things done more quickly. 80% of my time was dedicated to the technical part of the website and only 20% to the design aspect.

At the end, my lack of design abilities has been the main problem: it was really hard to attract companies and associations with a design which didn’t look corporate at all.

Finally, without any money to invest in design, our idea was perfect on paper but the realization as a whole wasn’t enough convincing. Even a well developed website, without any bugs, can’t convince customers if the design is really bad, as it is the first impression given to visitors.

• Doubts

During those three months, and especially since it was my first large development project that I started from scratch, I had a lot of doubts about my development choices. When you develop an application or a website you never know if you are writing the “best” code. By “best” I mean the most adaptable, the most evolutionary code possible, which is the definition of an “optimized” code. I think that the answer to the question “did I make the right choice or is it possible to optimize the source code?” is that you can always optimize it but sometimes you have to make some choices because you can’t always imagine all the future developments of your website.

• Technical insights

If I had to make the same project again I think I would use a language based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern (it could be RoR or even the MVC version of PHP). Indeed, with MVC, everything is clearer: data access and business logic, data presentation, and user interaction are separated in different files. I’ve also learnt that developing this kind of project alone is really hard as you can’t get any feedback on your code and the testing part is even longer.

• Business insights

The fact of having both a technical and a business education has helped me a lot in this project as I was able to better understand the requirements of my business partner. And it has shown me that software / web developers can’t become obsessed by the development to the detriment of the business idea (and unfortunately it is often the case, which leads to products with a perfect code but which are unmarketable!). I’ve also experienced the thrill of being both a software developer and an entrepreneur, which leads to accept with pleasure long hours and an entire dedication to a project.

Rémy is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can read more about him on his initial announcement.

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Dear readers! I am happy to introduce a new blogger joining our team: Cecil Dijoux!

Cecil brings a lot to the table here at Tech IT Easy. He’s a father of two (important), has good taste in music (very important), has broad experiences writing for magazines, and most recently on his blog, about music, culture, business, and tech (awesome), has lived in the U.K., Switzerland, and his home-country France (awesome), and 18 years of experience in software development (meh.. just kidding! Very cool!).

On this blog, we have long missed someone who has worked in the field of open source software and Cecil very much fits that bill. Finally someone to shut those Microsoft- and Apple-lovers up and tell them the real deal. That FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) is here to stay, baby! In any case, I look forward to some interesting debates!

Also on the topic of internet culture, I think Cecil can contribute greatly, as he already does on his own blog “Heavy Mental .” Last but not least, I believe Cecil is the first father writing on this blog, and I hope he can give us naives some insights into how to raise a future generation of geeks.

So, without further ado, please join me in extending a warm welcome to Cecil Dijoux!

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Twitter freaks like me have recently taken some heat for slowing their blog posting pace because they were twitting. Lazy us. So I decided to occasionally post some tweets (ie very small arcticles) on this blog. Here’s one.

At school, pupils are taught not to cheat on one’s neighbour. Cheating is like stealing or killing someone: it’s a crime and it’s wrong. What matters is your performance. No matter if it’s low or high since someone will normally get you on the path to improvement.

In the real world, especially in high tech, I believe tables are turned: I think not watching over one’s neighbour’ shoulders is a crime. In the real world, schools put aside, everybody watches everybody, every copies everybody – for the sake of all, on the condition that intellectual property isn’t violated.

To those willing to delve further (a Tweet is supposed to be short), I highly recommend you to take a look at this ‘Break from the pack: how to compete in a copycat economy’ book by Oren Harari (not the one on the side picture). I read it last year and it was worth it: examples on how to differentiate were very telling (WFMI, Madonna, etc.) but still, the most thriving businesses are those who steal the best from competitors and build something special of their own genius on top of it. Apple didn’t invent user interfaces and the mouse (Xeroc PARC did) but still, it manufactured the first mouse and user interface personal computer, namely the Macintosh, because it knew, something more than its competitors about industrial design. By the same token, Microsoft didn’t invent operating systems (and even purchased for a flat fee a major part of what became IBM PC DOS from Gary Kildall’s CP/M) but managed to build a dominant position in this market by superbly implementing a very innovative OEM business model. Google eventually monetized its search engine capabilities by replicating, in a somewhat more talented way, what Yahoo! was doing with the Overture online ad platform, etc. etc.

In short, business often is about copying or dying. To win, one has to bring something hard to replicate -on top of the commodity: Apple products are well-designed and therefore sexy; Microsoft is a formidable organization when it comes to democratizing technology ie taking unknown software products to mass market; Google provides cutting-edge search results. Any more good example, anyone?

ADDENDUM 9:29pm GMT +1: reading it again, maybe the post wasn’t so short after all…Sorry about that.

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Mmm, the title of this post is teasing enough that I guess it’s going to attract quite a crowd. Anyways, here’s the answer: a sine qua non condition to be acquired by EBAY, MSFT or GOOG is basically to at least meet with them. Correct?

If you realize the answer to this question is “yes”, then you’ll probably find yourself interested in meeting with Corporate Development Vice-Presidents of all 3 corporations. Aymeril Hoang, ICT Director @ French Embassy in the Bay Area is organizing such a business trip, a unique opportunity to build a network that will facilitate your exit strategy at some point. More info about here. Nota Bene: French Web 2.0 startups only, sorry about that

PS: Aymeril and his team are instrumental in the success of another Bay Area study trip of which I’m an organizer, which will take place slightly later (more about it soon). Actually, we have even built a partnership with the French Embassy to ensure we will get the very best visits and lecturers.

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