Mark Roseman's Blog

The Kind of Questions You Like to Hear.

Always nice when people are asking questions like "I've looked through the documentation and don't see feature X. Is this possible to do? It would really help us." right when you're in the middle of actually working on feature X.

New Group for Mac Indie Developers.

Brent Simmons set up a group for the various Mac indie developers (and others possibly interested in starting up as an indie) to discuss some of the business and other non-code issues. Undoubtedly this will become a great resource.

How to Hire People. Or Not.

A tale of two organizations, trying to recruit someone they dearly need, in an industry where there's a huge shortage of qualified people.

The first organization makes a huge show of wanting to attract that person, is extremely receptive to the way that person would like to see things work, and makes it clear they want to do what it takes to make things happen.

The second organization talks about a position with a completely different emphasis than the person has talked about wanting before, and fundamentally believes that the person would be lucky to work there, and that it would be the best thing for their career.

Remember, both organizations have a need for this person, the second somewhat more than the first actually. Three guesses where the person is likely to go.

p.s. for bonus points, guess how much the personal/political priorities of the individuals at each organization doing the negotiating are lined up with the more general organizational priorities?

Why should it be easy to try our software?

Jean-Claude pointed me at this Joel article, on how it can take an hour or more and huge downloads (e.g. the 22mb .NET runtime) just to use some software... a consequence of the way most people are building software today, and the increasing enterprise orientation of most (larger) software companies. For us also, a small (<2mb) download, and no dependencies is a no-brainer - we don't want to be throwing up roadblocks in the way of people even just trying our stuff. Scary that this is increasingly a differentiator.

Interesting juxtaposition with a TidBITS interview with Bruce Horn, who wrote the Finder and Resource Manager for the original Mac. The whole Finder was 46kb, the Resource Manager 3kb! (Irrelevant side note: the company that Bruce is with now is a ProjectForum customer).

Offshore outsourcing.

Good article by the guy who wrote Free Agent Nation. My take is that that the bulk of people doing IT stuff don't deserve to be paid ridiculously good money... what they're doing is obviously not so hard for others to learn, and there's a good supply (contrast that with doctors for example). Not to say the really good people aren't worth their weight in gold.

It's not of course surprising that everyone is acting in their best interest about this (as with everything else). Though in this, as with most other political issues, the holier-than-thou, principled excuses to justify self-interest get real annoying to hear.

Study: Small businesses wary of Microsoft

Digging a Hole.

Did make a fair bit of progress on the central authentication stuff. When it's all done it will be nice - without the possibility of querying for passwords and so on the interface can actually know what a user can do or not do just based on their (single) login. The tradeoff though is that while things can get simpler for users, they do get a bit more complex for administrators.

The further that I get into it, the more special cases to handle are coming up, so while I'm much further ahead than a few days ago, it's debatable if I'm further ahead in terms of how much work I think there is left! But I think also that with a small bit of refactoring, there's going to be some nice abstractions in the code which will really make future maintenance much easier.

Also goes to say that this would have been a complete nightmare to contemplate without the huge battery of automated tests to make sure I didn't break anything from before. Already close to 1000 lines of new tests added in the last few days, with much more to come. I like that the amount of test cases still seems to be about the same as the amount of code.

The hope is that I'll have the first major part of this completed and invisibly part of the next release (needing a special license key to activate) so as to get a few people to have an initial look at it - the visible part of the next release will consist of about 6-10 smaller changes that are being worked on in parallel.

In other news, Pauline's course went well, as did the time she spent in Windsor. She's got a meeting in Kitchener-Waterloo Thursday about the job there, and early info from a couple sources seem to suggest that should go very well indeed. Fingers crossed.

Time for More Coding.

Haven't gotten a lot of new stuff done since the holidays... occupied with the 3.2 release, a bunch of time-consuming bug fixing, quite a number of support requests, some infrastructure cleanup, chasing down some sales leads, etc. But Pauline is gone for the next few days (down to Windsor to meet with some people at the hospital there, and then back to London for an interviewing skills exam-prep course), so with any luck I'll be able to have a good stretch to move forward on some of the bigger code pieces.

First priority is advancing the work on the centralized registration option (which when ready will be offered as a new licensing option, allowing per-user rather than per-course licensing, single signin to all courses you have access to, etc.; phase two will extend that to allow connecting to an external directory e.g. LDAP). A nice option that will be a boon for larger deployments. Got a fair bit done already, but lots more to do, most of which is deadly boring. Ugh.

CSCW 2004.

This November in Chicago. Haven't gone to the last pile of CHI/CSCW conferences, but this might be a good opportunity to get back into it a little bit. Guess we'll see what's happening closer to the date.

WestJet and Hamilton.

WestJet is moving some of the short haul flights (Ottawa, Montreal) out of the Hamilton airport (ten minutes from here) and into the new terminal at Pearson. I guess not a big surprise.. we'll see what happens to the long haul routes over time. Bummer from the local perspective though.