A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

• There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
  • Back
  • Windows (the “Start” button)
  • Search
• The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
• The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
  • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
• A browser with:
  • Snappy performance
  • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
  • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
  • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
  • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
  • Multiple tabs
• The “People Hub”
  • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
  • Provides a live feed of your contacts
• Context-sensitive search:
  • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
  • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
    • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
    • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
    • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
    • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
• Email:
  • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
  • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
  • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
• Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
• Calendar:
  • Support for both work and personal calendars
• ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
• User-customizable UI colour schemes
• The “Pictures Hub”
  • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
  • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
  • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
  • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
  • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
• Music and Video
  • History: Most recently played music and videos
  • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
  • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
• The “Me” tile
  • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
  • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
• The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
• There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
• Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every Thursday in March and April, my co-worker John Bristowe and I will host the Ignite Your Coding webcast series. Each hour-long webcast will feature a guest speaker selected from the bright lights in software development. John and I will start off by asking them about their views on the industry and how to thrive in an era of great technological, business and social change, and then it’ll be your turn to ask the questions.

The theme of the webcast series is “staying on top of change”. I can’t deny hat there’s a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of “computable” isn’t even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life “in the trenches”.

John and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of “dream guests” and then inviting them to speak. John’s pretty well-established in the .NET world, so he went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. I’ve spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so I was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you’ll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We’ll record them all, so if you can’t catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for “paying back technical debt” with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He’s also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we’ll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a “what’s hot and what’s not” with developers of .NET today. We’ll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

A Chat with “Uncle Bob” Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the second in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010, the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from NSFW, a keynote given by my friend Pete Forde, partner at Unspace and one of the bright lights of Toronto’s tech scene.

My notes appear below. Pete’s posted his slides, notes and URLs online; be sure to check them out.

Introduction

“This talk is going to be adult,” began Pete. “If you can’t handle it, you should probably leave. I’ll buy you a Dasani afterwards.”

• I’m a partner at Unspace
  • It’s a company where I decided to bet the farm on Rails, a platform I like
  • We’ve done unusual things, like hold a job fair where local Ruby programmers could show off their work
  • We’ve built software projects for the UN
  • Every project we take on has a lot of heart
  • We don’t want to work with anyone who isn’t super-excited to be there
• I’m a software developer, have been for a long time
• But deep down, I want to be a designer
  • I have no formal training — I can’t draw; I can’t paint
  • I see life as a series of carefully-executed series of five year plans
  • I dropped out of high school 20 minutes before the final exam; I told the principal that I didn’t want him to take credit for future success
    • I don’t recommend this; it’s probably not repeatable, not even by me
• You – as engineering and computer science students –- are better educated than me
  • “You probably know math and stuff”
• In the past, I was a punk, and many other things
  • I’ve been a musician
  • I’ve also been a zine publisher
  • I’ve tried on a lot of things to see if the shoe fits
  • I’ve had an interesting run
• When I get to the end of 5 years of doing something, I review what I’ve done
  • I’ve had 5 years of doing software at Unspace – what now?

On Pete

• My dad’s an engineer, and as such, is a perfectionist
  • Engineers are by and large pedantic control freaks — and that’s okay, we need you to be that way!
• I’ve discovered that I’m a starter, not a finisher
• This tendency has put me at odds with my family and I used to feel really guilty about it
• Now I realize is that you need to play to your strengths — recognize that you have an instinct, and harness it!
• Is what you’re doing against the grain?
  • "There’s no time like the present to get your life on track"
  • "I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could talk to my present-day self"
• As a starter but not a finisher, I realized that I had to recruit doers, people who could take my ideas and run with them
  • Some of these projects will succeed
  • Some will fail…but they’ll fail grandly
  • I’ve got lots of things on the go
  • Am I arrogant? I see it as audacious
  • Seth Godin said: “If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader."
• I am an introvert
  • See the article in The Atlantic, Caring for Your Introvert
  • So what am I doing onstage?
  • People who appear practiced onstage look that way because they are practiced

On Success

• Steve Jobs says: “Find what you love”
  • People confuse “successful” with “happy”
  • Are you putting your life on hold to go and make your paycheque?
  • I’m convinced that many financially successful people are unhappy and bitte
• Malcom Gladwell’s The Sure Thing
  • It paints a different picture from the one we see in the media of the entrepreneur as daring, as a “cowboy”
  • Entrepreneurs who became empire builders turned out be highly risk-averse
  • Their success comes from seeing opportunities in arbitrage and taking advantage of them
  • Consider John Paulson:
    • His hedge fund made money shorting America’s economy
    • He bought shorts on subprime mortgages
  • These men are predatory entrepreneurs in my opinion
  • Do they really need billions?
  • Maybe they don’t do it for evil – perhaps it might be for the thrill
• Don’t want to model himself after these people
  • There’s a line written by Seth Tobocman, who wrote the comic book World War 3: "You don’t have to fuck people over to survive."
  • My twist on that is "You don’t have to fuck yourself over to be successful."
• Who would I rather model myself after? Steve Jobs
  • He said: “Good business makes for good art”
• Another good bit of advice comes from Andy Warhol: “Think rich, look poor.”
• On Being an Artist
  • There used to be a harsh disciplinary division between technology and art and it’s reflected in code and art
  • Different now in the era of Rails
  • I like holding parties and inviting all sorts of people: if you put interesting people together from all walks of life, you’ve got a catalyst for change in your living room
  • The lines are blurring: we’re all artists now
• Consider these guys
  • Ronald Tackmann, escape artist
    • "He hates being free"
  • Blane Nordahl, Silver thief
    • "The Mr. Belvedere of silver theft"
  • Both really good, treated their work like artistry

On Starting Up

• How Unspace came to be
  • It started 5 years ago with 2 friends in 170 square feet of space
  • “There wasn’t enough room to lie down and make a snow angel”
  • Everything that happened in those first years was "path of least resistance"
  • We had this weird notion that Unspace would be worth nothing and function as a quasi-legal organization whose reason for being was so that we could write off tech toy purchases
• We got lucky: Two founding partners — moved on to other things
  • One of them has since moved on, regrettably, to Ashley Madison
  • Choosing partners was important decision
• Optimism springs eternal among entrepreneurs: there’s always that feeling that nothing can go wrong
• Daniel Tenier says: “Partnerships suck”
  • It’s important to make your agreements explicit
  • Don’t be afraid to discuss bad stuff
  • Write everything down
  • You can’t make it work at all costs – you need to know when to walk away
  • Try to get to the bottom of questions like "What’s your definition of success?" Of failure? What’s the sunset clause? What’s the shotgun clause?
  • If you absolutely don’t need a partner, go it yourself (I myself, since I’m not a finisher, need a partner)
  • Look up what Chris Dixon has written about founder vesting

On Products

• Most consulting companies start as product companies that were broke
• Consulting is “kind of like a drug” — it keeps the fix coming

On Customer Development

• You need to read Steven Gary Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• The ideas in this book led to the feeling in venture circles that customer development is a good thing
• If you’re starting a company that sells things to people, read it!

Leadership

• Seth Godin says this of leadership: It’s about painting a picture of the future for other people and then leading them to it
• Back in 2004, things went terribly wrong
• I partnered with my friend Ryan, and it lasted a month
• I had “lots of partners” – it was hard to get things done
• Having a captain is good
• In addition to being a “time-and-materials” company, we also started holding events
  • We instituted Rails Pub Nite, a monthly event that created a sense on community and gets regular attendance
    • Opposite of a user group: no agenda
    • It’s the "smartest thing we’ve ever done as a company"
    • At the time, “people making a living off Ruby you could count on both hands”
    • One of the raisons d’etre of Rails Pub Nite was to create meaningful competition
    • We went so much farther ahead by giving it the generic name Rails Pub Nite as opposed to Unspace Pub Nite
    • What we wanted to do was not create a feeling of participating in a corporate social experience
    • It was successful: Rails Pub Nite’s mailing list has 450 people, and every Pub Nite gets 40 – 50 attendees, and not just Ruby programmers, but also Java, .NET and PHP

Building Your Team

• Another benefit of Rails Pub Nite is that it lets us meet all the smart people first
• We have a “non-traditional fit test”
• I feel that 8 – 14 people is perfect size for company
• I’m tired of working for small companies that grew to large companies that started to suck
• I’d rather have 3 companies with 12 people than 1 with 40 people

On Guilt

• I have no high school education — how am I building projects for the UN?
• It’s why sometimes, I feel like a fraud
• Many people have this feeling; it’s called “Impostor Syndrome”
• I feel like living embodiment of "fake it until you make it"
• Refactoring makes me feel like a fraud
• It’s the "Embarrassing Pattern": after looking over my code, it seems that I could replace a lot of it with existing stuff and patterns
• “Your entire codebase can be abstracted away”
• "I just spent a month writing 40 lines of code"
• You have to recognize that it happens

On Getting Ahead

• Read Derek Sivers’ (he’s the guy who created CDBaby and later sold it) article, There’s No Speed Limit
• He says that “the standard pace is for chumps”
• To get ahead, you have to push yourself beyond what you think your limits are
• We can do whatever we want, as fast as we want

Adventure

• Learning Giles Bowkett’s story through his RubyFringe presentation completely changed my life
  • [Joey’s note: really, you should watch the video of this presentation, even if you never ever plan to write a single line of Ruby in your life. It’s inspiring.]
• It was all about leading a life less ordinary
• In our line of work, we create things that didn’t exist before
• When someone who doesn’t know how to create things is put in charge of people who do, it’s bad
  • I believe that Giles called them "Weasel-brained muppetfuckers"
• Giles quotes Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship”
• My advice on dating websites: "Don’t make them"

On Marketing

• I’ve mentioned Seth Godin many times already
• Sometimes his books have 3 pages of insight buried in 100 pages – I supposed it’s a case of “The Devil’s in the details”
• Read The Dip, skip Tribes
• In Tribes, Godin says that people don’t believe what you tell them, sometimes believe what their friends tell them and always believe the stories they tell themselves.
• So give people stories they can tell themselves

On Ideas

• Dr. Edwin Land: Invented instant photography – Polaroid
• Polaroid was thought of as dead until enthusiasts like Florian Kaps bought the Polaroid factory and now they’re bringing Polaroid film back to the market
• I wanted to bring him to FutureRuby, but he was too busy changing the world
• Another person to watch: Kacie Kinzer, the creator of Tweenbots
• Also watch: Neil Gershenfeld
  • He builds fablabs
  • He’s building them in places so low-tech that they don’t even have electricity
  • Get involved with the MIT "Bits and Atoms" program
• Another person to read about: William Kamkwamba (see The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind)
  • [Joey’s note: Watch his presentation at TED!]

Grand Visions for the Future

• Disney wanted EPCOT to be a utopian city, a city of the future, but bureaucracy got in the way
• Jacque Fresco: 93-year-old chronic inventor — a radical revolutionary
  • He designs amazing future habitat buildings
  • He has a whole compound of bubble domes in Venus, Florida
  • See the movie Future by Design
  • He’s 93 — "You know what that implies"

On Being Happy

• Listen up!
• Once again, a Steve Jobs quote: "Your time is limited. "
• Look at Jessica Hische, who’s obsessed with type and makes beautiful things
  • She followed her passion, and now she’s an internationally sought-after type artist
  • She recently said: “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This is the first of a series of notes that I took while attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, which took place last week in Montreal. CUSEC is the biggest conference held by and for university students interested in software development. True to the Canadian techies punching well above their weight class (a great tradition started by Alexander Graham Bell), CUSEC manages to pull in big-name and up-and-coming speakers who’ve given talks that have outshined those I’ve seen an thousand-dollar-plus conferences.

The first keynote was given by Matt Knox, who has probably distributed more Scheme runtimes than anyone else in the world (and this is a larger number than you might think), which he did in the name of putting adware on millions of machines. He’s since come to his senses and seems quite contrite.

His presentation, On Weakness, is about his life on the Dark Side and the lessons he gleaned from it. It’s based on his talk, Crimes Against Humanity, Writ Small, which he gave at FutureRuby last year, but it was good to see it again, and its message is probably even more valuable to students. My notes (which I polished for comprehensibility) and photos from his session appear below:

An Evil Job

• How many of you are:
  • Technical, as opposed to business or arts students?
  • Engineering students?
  • Programmers?
  • Evil?
• That’s what this talk is about
• One way to describe one of my former jobs is doing “Windows hijinks with Scheme”
• During my time with that job, I released many scheme runtimes
• Aaron Swartz – I think it was at a Y Combinator startup camp – said this of me: "He uses Scheme for evil!"
• It was more than just Scheme – I was writing stuff that had alternately “hard” (statically-typed languages) and “soft” (dynamically-typed languages) layers
• I was in the adware business, which is like walking into a big monkey knife fight…
• …except I was using a death ray! (Scheme == death ray, C == knife)
• I started with good intentions, in the business of building spam filters
• Business wasn’t so hit, and I ran out of money
• My job search failed, but luckily, a job went looking for me
• I was so pleased with being found that I  forgot to talk salary
• I showed up for the interview and at the end, was invited to work for them
• I did terribly when it came time to discuss what I would be paid
  • I didn’t research the New York City job market and cost of living
  • I asked for $40K
  • When I saw the look of shock of the guy’s face, I thought that I had asked for too much
  • Start reducing what I asked for; luckily he stopped me
• We want you to come in an analyze our distribution chain, they said
• It turned out to be an adware company:
  • Bought people’s “digital tchochkes” or mini-apps, such as screensavers
  • They had realized that there’s no lower bound for how cheesy something can be and still be a big seller on the internet
  • They took these mini-apps and gave them away online for free, bundled with software that gives you "special offers" from time to time
• Some of these bundled apps turned out to be worms
  • So the company had me write software to remove any worms from a system and added them to the bundle
  • So now we were bundling my anti-malware along with their adware
  • I felt like "an assassin working for the mob, but killing terrorists". The mob were bad, but the terrorists were worse
  • "Awesome! I can probably keep up with Norton…it’ll be great!"
  • And for a while, the best way to eradicate worms your system was to install their adware with my anti-malware bundled with it
• Low-level coding is dangerously seductive
  • In the beginning, it’s "like getting kicked in the face over and over again by buffer overruns"
  • But then it becomes fascinating
• I wanted to do it in Scheme, but that would require embedding a Scheme interpreter
  • Such an interpreter would have to fit into a single TCP/IP packet (about 64K)
  • Scheme is great. For any superlative — “best performance”, “smallest app”, and so on – there are usually two contenders: some other language, and Scheme.
  • I managed to squeeze a Scheme interpreter down to 19K
• My success with killing the worms led to a new request: In addition to your all this malware on other machines, why not eliminate all the competitor’s adware?
  • Now I felt like “an assassin for the mob, killing other mobsters”. Not as noble.
• Then the next request came: How about keeping our software from being killed…by anything? (including Norton)
  • The only way to uninstall the adware was to use the uninstaller, which came with it
  • I initially viewed this as "a really interesting technical problem"
• All this was made possible by a couple of Windows quirks…
  • CreateRemoteThread
    • This basically says to a process: "Hey, process! Execute this code as part of yourself, and you’ll think it’s awesome."
    • This lets you have code executing even though a process isn’t running
    • You don’t even need threads – you can hook interrupts
  • Scheduler
    • You can have a process tell the scheduler that it needs to do a do-over — "I’m not done yet, I need more time", and the scheduler will grant that time
    • You can tell even Windows that a process is so important that if it fails, it needs to protect the user by presenting a blue screen
• Windows is interesting from a purely archaeological perspective
  • Consider that all strings in Windows are 16-bit unicode, which means that nulls can be embedded in strings
  • But C strings, which is what’s used in the underlying DOS, are null-terminated and therefore can’t contain nulls
  • Interesting effects when moving null-containing strings between these layers

What Drives People to Take Up Evil Jobs?

• Aftermath of my working at the adware company:
  • Company got sued for $190 billion (by Elliot Spitzer!)
  • I was the first employee at the company — everyone else was a contractor
• I left the company with these questions:
  • "Whut happen?"
  • "Is this who I am?"
• Some jobs pay lots of money, but it’s hard to transition out of them
• Will I be stuck in adware for the rest of my life?
• There are some historical precedents:
  • Albert Speer
    • A promising architect who liked soaring buildings
    • He hooked up with rising politicians with the same aesthetic sense, one of whom was Hitler
    • He started with creating buildings, but then became the Nazis’ chief logistics guy
    • Later, a leader of the U.S. Air Force said that had he been aware of Speer’s involvement as the Nazi’s chief logistics guy, he would’ve dedicated an entire wing of the Air Force exclusively to killing him
    • It’s been suggested that Speer prolonged the war by a year or two by running the German forces more efficiently
  • Manhattan Project staff
• But I didn’t want anecdotes…I wanted science!
  • There’s a scientific study of otherwise good people doing evil things: the Milgram Experiment
    • How many people would go all the way?
    • 1% of the population is psychotic – it was hypothesized that the number of people who’d go all the way would be similar
    • Instead, 70% did
    • Results replicatable with people from all walks of life
    • Women, it turned out, “went evil” in a slightly greater proportion than the men
    • "Most human evil lives here"
• Read The Black Book of Communism
• For a more mundane example of blind obedience to authority leading to evil, see "The strip search McDonald’s prank call"
  • In the prank, the prankster calls a McDonald’s, gets an employee on the line and says “I’m a police officer. We have reason to believe that there is a thief in your restaurant and we need you to take them into the back and hold them until we arrive.”
  • They provide a description vague enough so that someone in the restaurant will match it
  • Once coralled in the back, the prankster starts giving orders to torture and/or humiliate the customer, and many employees have complied
• So what does this mean?
  • The human brain has a remote root exploit in 70% of the installed base
• "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." — Steven Weinberg
  • Nope. Just authority.
• There is hope: people who were subjects of the Milgram experiments turned out to be better at resisting authoritative coercion

The Power of Communication

• Math: "There are only three reasonable numbers: 0, 1 and infinity"
• When Robert Andrews Millikan did his oil drop experiments to determine the charge on an electron, he initially got the value wrong by 30 – 40%
  • People who repeated the experiment or conducted similar experiments with results close to Millikan’s erroneous number published their results
  • People who did so but got the correct value – which did not match Millikan’s value – didn;t publish, worried that they’d done something wrong, since their numbers didn’t agree with the number published by the authority on the subject
• The world pre-blogs was so different from this world
  • Very first open source project: Oxford English Dictionary
    • Done via mail
  • Ever wondered where the term "flying off the handle" comes from?
    • It’s from sword-making – until they figured out the process of making swords as one-piece, with hand-friendly stuff wrapped around the base so you could hold them, swords often flew off their handles in battle
    • It took 900 years to evolve swords to one piece
• Not everything has been solved, but it’s easier today
• Rails is such a solution
  • It’s a series of incremental improvements
  • Can you out-Rails Rails?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For. In it, he writes:

As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing to fulfill by parting with our hard-earned cash. If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.

He breaks down people’s needs into the following categories, with an explanation of each one:

• Time: Convenience, Efficiency, Immediacy
• Scarcity
• Comfort
• Esteem: Id, Desirability, Self-Image, Ego
• Belonging: Relationships, Sex, Affection
• Survival: Health, Safety, Wellbeing
• Financial Security: Wealth, Success, Career
• Entertainment: Emotion, Experiences
• Intellectual Stimulation: Creativity, Learning, Expression

He also looks at how much people are willing to have different needs fulfilled. For example, people are willing to pay geometrically increasing prices for increasing comfort. Consider the 15x price difference between “cattle class” and first-class tickets on an airplane (even though both depart and arrive at the same times), or the 27x price difference between a bargain-basement pillow and a down-filled one:

Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different beast. According to Zambonini, across the wide array of entertainment options from games for their mobile phones to vacations in the tropics, people are willing to pay the same rate: $5 an hour…

He categorized the top 100 U.S. sites by the needs he listed — here’s how they break down:

Naturally, such categorization is subjective and had to be drastically simplified, with each site being slotted into a single category. Sites about food were put into the “survival” category, even though a top 100 site on food would probably cover things like gourmet food and wine, which could arguably be put into the “entertainment”, “comfort” and even “esteem” categories.

He closes the article with a series of questions that you should ask about your application, such as “Does my app allow the user to do something more quickly?”, “Does my app allow the user to express their creativity?”, “Does my app provide entertainment for the user?” and so on. Your should be able to answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, and better still, you should be able to explain why.

Links

• Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For
• Better Than Free: In it, Kevin Kelly “discusses the concept of ‘Generatives’: non-copyable qualities that retain value in a digital age.”
• Wikipedia page for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Follow Dan Zambonini on Twitter

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The T-shirt of the day at Tee Fury is sure to be a big hit fans of Star Trek and classic games. It’s the “Spock, Paper, Scissors” shirt:

Here’s a closer look at the design:

The shirt sells for US$9 plus shipping. It comes in two versions:

• Men’s: Slate blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL and XXL
• Women’s: Powder blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL

If you want it, you’ve got until the end of the day today (Monday, January 4th) to place an order. Once the day ends, Tee Fury will retire the design from production.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

All work and no play makes Joey a dull developer, which is why even though we make sure that TechDays is chock-full of content that developers and IT pros can use in their day-to-day work and stay on top of their tech, we also like to have a little fun. For example, in the video above, I interview local developer and well-coiffed gentleman D’Arcy Lussier about the possibility that he might don the Mexican wrestling outfit (he’s our answer to Strong Bad) and whether you can still be stylin’ whilst wearing Microsoft logowear, contrary to what Vancouver’s most notorious cage-fighting-and-coding arbiter of style says.

By the way, I’d like to thank D’Arcy for taking over my track TechDays, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, track at the last minute while I took over the Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track. D’Arcy, you are truly worthy commanding the Orange Shirts – I salute you with the finest hair-care products on a flaming sword!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.

There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.

But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover

I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:

Here’s a closeup:

(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)

The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WinMoDevCamp

Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th  from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.

• For more information about WinMoDevCamp, see my earlier WinMoDevCamp article.
• To register for WinMoDevCamp (remember, it’s free!), visit the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges, jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”:

(Regarding the photo in the right column, second one from the bottom – the piece of paper attached to the pencil sticking out of the computer says “Pull to turn on”. It’s a jury-rigged replacement for the power switch.)

Sloppy work like this isn’t limited to the physical world. I’ve seen (and okay, sometimes I’ve written) code that could’ve been a candidate for There, I Fixed It, and chances are you have too:

• Some of my hacks were a little more elegant and useful in the long-term, as long as you weren’t going to be too fussy about aesthetics. They were the software equivalent of the CD-ROM drive installed below the car radio and attached to it with a cable with 1/8” stereo jacks. They weren’t pretty, but they were solid, reasonably maintainable and viable in the long term.
• Others were terrible kludges that were originally intended to be temporary solutions that forgotten and lived much longer than they should have. They were like fixes shown in the two photos on the bottom (the hasty bridge repair and the car exhaust held together with zip-ties).
• I’ve also copped out by glossing over bad user interface design with some explanatory text or dialog box instead of actually correcting the design. This is not unlike labelling a doorknob “hard to open” or a hastily-improvised switch “pull to turn on”.

Be sure to check out There, I Fixed It. They’ve had some pretty hilarious pictures lately, and perhaps it’ll inspire (or shame) you to eschew the quick fix or kludge in favour of putting some time and thought into writing better code and building better user interfaces.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

To celebrate the release of Windows 7, Japanese Burger King franchises are offering a Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties, selling for 777 Yen (CAD$8.92 as of this writing), available only for the next 7 days. I have no idea why they’re not doing this on this side of the Pacific; I’m sure it would be a big hit:

According to Julie from ObjectSharp, the Japanese text after “13cm” says “American-size buns”.

[Thanks to Ian Irving for pointing this to me!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I have no idea if WIND Mobile is going to be able to deliver what they promise – a mobile phone company that listens to its customers and provides better service than the sad players in the Canadian mobile phone oligarchy – but they’ve got the right ideas and some rather funny videos that perfectly illustrate what the Canadian mobile customer has to contend with.

What if Toronto’s hot dog vendors had a pricing model like Canadian mobile phone companies? Buying a hot dog would be like this:

Canada is the only country in the world where mobile companies lock you into three-year contracts for mobile service, and this situation is illustrated in the video titled Bike Lock:

I always look at the service packages offered by U.S. mobile companies with envy. Here, the mobile companies love nickel-and-diming you:

WIND is a new entrant into the Canadian mobile phone market and a branch of Globalive Communications, who already have a presence in Canada in the form of Yak Communications, an alternative phone and internet provider. They seem to be taking a very “social media” approach to their marketing, what with the “viral” YouTube videos and a “conversational” website in which readers are encourage to actively participate in online discussions.

They look like an interesting company to watch, and hey, if they can get me a better deal than Rogers, I’ll switch.

Recommended Reading

Tom Purves has been one of voices leading the battle cry against Canadian mobile companies for the past couple of years. Back in 2007 at DemoCamp 17, he gave what I consider to be the best ignite presentation ever given at a Toronto DemoCamp, The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation:

He recently revised his presentation for 2009 when he presented it at the FITC mobile conference in September, which mentions WIND mobile:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Kathy Sierra, who co-created O’Reilly’s “Head First” series of books and who used to write the very inspirational Creative Passionate Users blog, is awesome at helping users become awesome. I use her lessons as guidelines in my evangelism work and even borrowed from her to create a catchphrase that I used when interviewing for my job at Microsoft: “My goal is to help developers go from zero to awesome in 60 minutes.”

The blog O’Reilly Radar points to a great Ignite presentation (a style of presentation that’s restricted to 20 slides, each auto-advancing every 15 seconds for a grand total of 5 minutes) in which Kathy Sierra talks about ways to make your users awesome. The presentation is titled Being Better is Better, and I’ve posted it below, followed by point-form notes, which I took so that it’s easier for you to become awesome at making your users awesome:

• If we want to create passionate users, we need to help them get better.
  • ‘Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at.”
  • Many people still have their cameras permanently set on “P” – automatic mode — even though those cameras offer finer control over things like shutter speed and aperture
  • What would it mean to our users if we unlock the door and help them be awesome?
• In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, a major theme is the “10,000 Hour Rule”, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something.
  • 10,000 is a long time – it’ can be a depressing prospect
  • [Joey: According to Outliers, 10,000 hours makes for about 3 hours of focused practice every day for 10 years.]
  • To get good, you have to practice all the time.
  • Anything that makes it easier for your users to get practice – any time, anywhere – will help them get their 10,000 hours (and get good) sooner.
• Give your users patterns for success
  • In any pattern you give your users, make sure that there’s “the one thing” that they can take away as a lesson
  • You need to answer the question: “What’s the one thing you can do to be amazing?”
• Give your users better gear
  • They’ll work better
  • “Spend the money!”
  • Give people a way to justify the better gear you’re offering them
• Motivation is important
  • Treat motivation as a gift
  • Make a product that people will actually use
  • “Your treadmill is not in the corner gathering dust because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.”
  • “Make the right thing easy for people and the wrong thing hard.”
• And now, some anti-patterns:
  • We focus on the tool and not the thing the users want to accomplish with the tool
  • “We treat people really well before they buy, and afterwards, we treat them poorly.”
    • This is also the reason people don’t want to upgrade
    • If we want to help people upgrade – which is what they’ll need to do if they want to go forward – we have to accept that it’s a loss and a hit to their self-esteem
  • We write FAQs as if our users they were intellectually curious and have a tablet PC handy
    • People hit the FAQs and help because they’re having a horrible experience
  • “Don’t let the ease-of-use police” step in an dumb something down
    • You don’t feel awesome when you’ve mastered something that a 3-year-old can master
  • Hiring a social media consultant is the wrong thing to do
    • They focus in the wrong direction
    • Social media consultant are focused on making your users love you, which is the wrong thing – nobody is awesome because they love you
    • They think the goal is to make users want to party with you
    • The true goal is to make your users want to party because of something you did that helped them become awesome. They should want to party because of you, but without you
    • You want to connect users with other users, not with your company
    • A much better use of social media is to find out:
      • What role we play in our users’ lives
      • What role our competitors play in our users’ lives
      • What the pain and pleasure points for our users are
    • By trying to be competitive and focusing on our competitors, we end up being uncompetitive
      • This leads to featurities
      • We end up building things that end up harming our users
      • The best thing we can do is to look at the bigger, cooler thing – the world in which our products and our competitors’ products exist, the problems that the products are trying solve, the things at which our users are trying to kick ass – and blog, tweet and use social media about that
  • Getting WOM (Word-of-Mouth) may be the social marketers’ holy grail, but the true goal is WOFO – Word of [Effing] Obvious.
    • If your users are so good, you get WOFO.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s the second Monday in October, which means it’s Canadian Thanksgiving (or in French, Jour de l’Action de grâce)! I’d like to wish you a safe and happy holiday and remind you to think of what you’re thankful for.

Right now (at the time of this writing) at the Toronto edition of the TechDays cross-Canada conference, in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, is Bruce Johnson – “the speaker so nice, we put him on twice!” – talking to the audience about Building RESTful Applications Using WCF.

REST – as in REpresentational State Transfer – while a big thing for a lot of developers, is still only gaining traction in the Microsoft world, in which a lot of resource access is done with SOAP. Since Microsoft is more about interoperability these days, it’s important to get developers building on the Microsoft platform up to speed with REST and different ways to build RESTful services using Microsoft technologies, whether it’s ASP.NET MVC or Bruce’s area of expertise, WCF, Windows Communications Foundation.

Bruce is playing to a full room, which is a good sign – it’s good to see developers interested in learning new things!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This morning’s sessions in TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform focuses on both the ASP.NET MVC web app framework and recommended object-oriented programming practices, namely the Model-View-Controller pattern with Colin Bowern’s presentation earlier this morning and now (at the time of this writing) the SOLID principles in Bruce Johnson’s session, SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications.

Assless Chaps + Twitter = Business Opportunity

You might remember Bruce from the “Assless Chaps” story. The story can be summarized in the three tweets shown below.

First came Bruce’s response to my article about CodeCamp back in April, in which I forgot to mention the session he was doing:

I tweeted him back and then decided to throw in a jokey reply:

My thinking was: Hey, this is a conference of Microsoft developers! Yes, they’re a bright and talented bunch, and I like them, but they’re an older, corporate, more buttoned-down crowd. They’d never go for renaming a session from “Data Binding” to “Data Bondage”.

But Bruce and the Toronto Code Camp organizers surprised me – he changed the name of his session very quickly:

And since he responded to my challenge, I had to fulfill my end of the bargain:

The “Assless Chaps” story doesn’t end there. Yesterday, while we were hanging out by the Windows 7 lounge and the “Assless Chaps” story came up. Bruce told me that our conversation on Twitter about the assless chaps actually landed his company, ObjectSharp, some business. A local developer got curious as to what the “assless chaps” business was all about in Bruce’s and my conversation on Twitter and the ensuing conversation got them talking about ObjectSharp’s services, which in turn became a contract.

The moral of the story: there’s actual business value in Twitter and assless chaps. I may have to go buy a pair (I rented the ones pictured above).

There’s a tamer version of this story in Canadian Developer Connection.

Most of you will be heading to FailCamp via public transit, and many have asked how to get to FailCamp’s venue, the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, from Union Station – here’s how!

First, go up to the main level of Union Station, which looks like this:

On the west end of the station – the side with the Harvey’s – you should see a sign marked “Skywalk”. Go down that hall!

Keep going…

There’ll be a slight twist to the left, but keep following the hallway! You’ll get to a tunnel like this:

Keep going! At the top of the steps at the end of the tunnel, it’ll turn left and you’ll see this:

That’s the entrance to the actual Skywalk, which looks like this. Follow the signs to the door on the left that says “Convention Centre”…

…then follow the signs that say “South Building”…

…and follow the arrows that lead you to the TechDays conference. FailCamp is in room 716, which is on the 700 level of the South Building. Note that the 700 level is below the 600 level, not above it.

See you at FailCamp!

FailCamp Toronto 3 is 10 days away! Come join us in our “celebration of fail”. We’ll share stories about the times when things went pear-shaped, got SNAFUed, or just plain failed — and just as important, the lessons we learned from them. And unlike many failures, FailCamp’s admission is free.

For more details about FailCamp, see the FailCamp registration page or this earlier article.

That’s right, you want to join FailCamp Toronto 3, the celebration of FAIL taking place on Tuesday, September 29th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre! Take it from Kanye, you don’t want to miss this event. For more details, see the FailCamp event page and my earlier article on FailCamp Toronto 3.