I must have learned something from the first chapter of The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas (who’s probably better known these days for his contributions to the Ruby community through his publishing company and must-have book Programming Ruby) when I read it long ago. In that chapter, Dave’s 8th tip is to, “Invest Regulary in Your Knowledge Portfolio”. One of the ways he suggests doing so is to learn one new language a year. Well, this year I seem to be making up for years gone by, because I’ve been spending a lot of my extra time working with several different languages and their frameworks. This year, I’ve been working with – in order as of today – haXe, Flash Lite 1.1, Ruby, ActionScript 3.0, XUL, and the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. I’ve been working with their frameworks Ruby on Rails, Flex, and XULRunner.
All of these languages are tools to build the kind of software that I’m interested in building: software that’s fun to write, easy to distribute, a pleasure to use, useful, and affordable. For software to be distributed easily and a pleasure to use has to be universally available. And, to be universally available it needs to be truely cross-platform – cross-software and cross-hardware. It needs to work on win, mac, and nix and also in a browser, on a desktop, and on a palmtop. Today, the best format to make software universally available is the SWF format. It’s undeniable, more people have the Flash Player than any other piece of software .
It is, granted, worth noting that some feel like traditional Java, non-traditional Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, and the Mozilla Foundation’s XUL are also acceptable tools to make available software, and depending on the goal, they’re correct. In many cases, these technologies can even enhance a SWF’s funcionality. For example, it’s possible to use Mozilla’s XULRunner as a desktop wrapper for SWFs, or if you’re really smart, to do what Rich Kilmer did and write a SWF view to a Ruby controller and Berkeley DB model. Rich gave me and Luke a sneak peak at his indi product at RailsConf, and we were blown away. The product is a great idea, and it’s built on an extremely smart and interesting architecture. Get indi when it’s available.
Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio.
Category Archives: Start-ups
Mashups, MashupCamp
If you haven’t read or heird something about MashupCamp, here it goes:
“an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the Internet software mashup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup[..]”
Don’t get excited because it has happened already, in July 2006. Luckily, talk videos are available. But what are mashups anyway?
“Mashups (be they software or content-oriented) are most often characterized by the way they draw upon functionality and/or content from two or more sources (at least one of which is third-party to the developer) to produce a new creative work.”
Any examples?
“taking something like Yahoo Maps and mashing it together with your Salesforce.com data to come up with some cool new innovative Web-based application? Or, are you thinking of building something unique and interesting on top of the application programming interfaces (APIs) from Amazon.com and Eventful.com?”
A nice example of a mashup is blueOKapi.com that is mainly mashing up Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube all together using Ruby on Rails.
Other mashup examples are linked on their wiki together with interesting resources. Check them out if you’re interested :)
Note: ferodynamics.com has an article about the recent plane crash in Manhattan and how the “social” approach in sites like Digg didn’t quite work well this time:
With the story now at 1088 diggs, the top comment is, “***** you. This is no time to inject conspiracy theorys.” So much for crowd wisdom.
Introducing Pandora.com (Part I)
Credit where credit is due. TJ introduced me to Pandora.com, an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by The Music Genome Project and also the best freakin’ web-based application I’ve seen in ages.
The idea behind it is to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes like rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies or displayed instrumental proficiency to describe songs. You start by firing away your favorite band and Pandora will stream a song from that band and then follow with songs that match the attributes of your favorite band. The funky shit is that its works! It catched my ear since the first minute and I listened to it all day.
There are so many things I would like to say about this I don’t know where to start.
1. Pandora doesn’t require Login/Register/Sign-Up to begin using the application. You can have several previews first which makes all sense. First you see the real value of what you will be using, then you register. Not the other way around.
2. Can you imagine the amount of songs they index and have information about? It blows my mind thinking of it.
3. There’s an article on Pandora by Fast Company magazine called “Algorhythm and Blues” that gives an overview on the history of this application and the Oakland small company behind it.
4. For those of you who read Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start”, you may like to know the company behind Pandora nailed down a $1.5 million round of angel funding – including a sizable chunk from Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com, back in late 1999. No doubt well invested money, this is now definitely a million-dollar company (not that I would know).
Oh well, that’s it. Enjoy and relax. After all… “music calms even the savage beast”.
European Startups
Techcrunch has an article about Innovate 2006, a conference that went down in Zaragoza, Spain, this week. Dozens of European startup companies showcased their products and services, of which some are web applications. Skype, eBay Europe, Symbian, Six Apart, Netvibes and the list goes on… see the complete list here.
They even summarized the startups they found most interesting which is way cool.
Interesting quotes from the article:
>“First, entrepreneurs in Europe are not revered in the same way as the U.S. Many people in Europe consider entrepreneurs to be greedy and arrogant, trying to reach above themselves. That has to change. Entrepreneurs tend to ignore risk/reward ratios, drive economic growth, bring new jobs to a country. They should be encouraged, not socially chastised”
>“Second, the complexity of creating a corporate entity, hiring employees and raising capital needs to be reduced. It’s simply too hard to create a company and get started.”
>“Third, taxes must come down, or entrepreneurs will continue to flee to the US and elsewhere.”
There’s algo a blog that seems to have some good reading.
Remember the Milk
Starting the day with a post on your blog can be anti-productivity but I’ll take the risk today.
Something I wanted to talk for some time now is Remember the Milk. According to the authors its the best way to manage online to-do lists. But what I really wanted to talk is how I found it.
While browsing the PostgreSQL website I noticed the small bottom link they have to TinySofa and got curious. I then followed the link and discovered Remember the Milk and also their one Linux distro also called TinySofa. My first though was “real entrepreneurs these guys”.
This is great example of how helping open-source projects can be a good thing for company. I can only think how much web traffic they get from that small link and the money they are not spending on marketing.
As for the application itself, it’s the Web 2.0 thing you could expect.
Update: In a conversation with prla he brought up a good question. He thinks this is an excellent, excellent app., one of the best Web 2.0 examples, both in terms of interface and features. The question is, will the user be more happy with the long feature list of Remember The Milk or by the simplicity of TadaList?