So, I’m building a website. It’s a tool for programmers, which I think is pretty useful. Is it a “startup”? I don’t know. I don’t even really know if it’s a good idea yet. The way I work probably isn’t the way others work so who knows if anybody else will find this thing useful. Programmers are very picky about tools, and rightly so. When talking about my somewhat expensive keyboard I bought for myself to have at work, I said “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” which is of course a famous quote but also fits how I feel about tools. Programmers need guns. Metaphorically.

But anyway, I don’t know if it’s a startup. It’s an idea. It’s an experiment. I would love more than anything for this thing to take off so I can hire some of my friends to come work with me. I would love it if this experiment took off enough just to support me working on it. But right now I’m not really interested in the typical TechCrunch / VC / Valley / Bubble / blahblah startup. I’m building this thing myself since I’m doing it for no money. I’m going to bootstrap it, which is startup-speak for actually making money like a real business. At some point if it makes sense to let somebody give me money, I’ll consider it of course. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and all that. Money isn’t evil, it’s a tool.

I think it’s a shame we’ve lost some of the “2 people in a garage” excitement from the early 2000s. Yeah, there’s a lot to making a modern website. So what? That’s part of being a programmer, learning new stuff. That’s part of why I call this thing an experiment, if it was a business I wouldn’t be able to play around as much. I’m learning about Heroku instead of using a server which is something I already know how to do. I’m using Grails and Groovy instead of Java which I already know. I’m using Mongodb instead of Mysql which, you guessed it, I already know. Even stuff like wildcard ssl certificates is new to me since they didn’t used to have those when I was an admin. Is some of this new stuff going to bite me in the ass since I don’t know it? Probably. But I’ll do what I’ve always done which is learn on the job. And in the end I’ll have built something cool, learned a ton of new stuff, and had fun. And maybe made some money.

We’ll see where this thing goes. More later.

A great (and short) video from a great coder about selling software to women. While the talk is about women, really the larger ideas are about anyone.

I’ve been thinking about these sorts of ideas for awhile and I’ll have a post on it soon.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful.

The Mythical Man Month, p. 291

via CLOSED-LOOP: The passionate developer: I do like my profession, I don’t like my job.

This is great stuff. I’ve always felt the way Fred Brooks talks about in that quote and this post captures a lot of how I feel about my job as well. Well worth reading.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Monochrome Blog – If architects had to work like software developers.

Painfully true. Very painfully.

I’m trying to decide if sending this to our product owner would be informative or insulting.

Great presentation. Goes very fast too, don’t be scared of the number of slides.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that Google should play a role in this URL shortener ecosystem. They’re big enough not to go away and they maintain such a central role in the web anyway I think they’d be a good default choice. But they’ve shown no interest in getting into the shortener business as a competitor to Tr.im, Bit.ly, and the rest so I was thinking they should take the role of a shortener warehouse. If a service like Tr.im goes away, they transfer the list of links and short codes to Google and the URLs keep working at a minimum. Apparently Bit.ly is trying to get something like this going but I have a feeling since they’re in the business, their competitors aren’t going to sign on. And I fear Tr.im has helped sow some amount of distaste for Bit.ly with their blog posts about Bit.ly’s favored status with Twitter so that isn’t going to help.

But narrowing this down to Tr.im, I’m trying to decide if I should start using them again. I like them much more than Bit.ly, but this incident hasn’t helped them at all. They said originally they couldn’t make a business out of Tr.im if Twitter was going to explicitly favor Bit.ly. This is obviously still true. They’re not on firmer ground now than before, they’ve just made a bunch of noise. The tempest-in-a-Twitter they caused with their frankly somewhat offensively curt shutdown messages may end up causing Twitter to rethink their One URL Shortener To Rule Them All stance but if the favoritism really comes from their VCs and board members personal connections, I doubt it. They have to know if they starve out Tr.im and the rest, people will grumble but in the end we’ll all move on.

According to some stats I saw, Tr.im was a minuscule percentage of the number of links on Twitter. I think the brouhaha about Tr.im shutting down was really a reaction to the realization that one of these services could just evaporate almost overnight. And that isn’t going to help them survive but it may kick some kind of warehousing service like I mentioned above into gear. They may have been tricked by feelings of importance when really they were just the canary in the mine, in the end serving only as a warning to everybody else.

So Tr.im hasn’t been saved by this, the creators just caved and the service will limp along not making money like it wasn’t doing before. And on top of this, their willingness just to shutter the service with very little notice doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Until people start hearing news about money coming into the service or of a buyer swooping in where one hadn’t been willing to swoop before, users like me are going to switch if just to minimize the number of links a shutdown would endanger. They may have just doomed themselves to a more public death later with this resurrection.

I’ve always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I’ve even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to “move up the corporate ladder” into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company’s bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger.

via Moserware: Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer.

This book looks like something both my wife and I would both like. I’m like Jeff Moser here, I’m curious about what people actually learn doing this stuff but not enough to read a bunch of boring books full of business-speak. $12 for an overview sounds good to me. It never hurts to be more well-rounded as a team member in any case. Even if I just get an overview of the financial pieces and the jargon people use, it’ll be worth it.

My wife is also in the process of setting up a business with a couple of partners to market some software she wrote. Even though she’s the programmer and her partners are the sales/business end of things, it’s never good to cede control over something that important to somebody else with no understanding of what they’ll be doing.

Jeff does a great job of going over the various sections of the book and what you’ll learn in each and I applaud him for the effort. If you’re cheap, you can probably get by with just Jeff’s post, to be honest. But an overview of an overview is one level of remove too much for me. I read fast anyway so it’ll be time well spent I think. Plus, when somebody asks me something about business I can say I read a book about MBAs, not that I read a blog post about a book about MBAs. :)

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.”

via The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart.

Excellent article. I didn’t expect the veer into philosophy there near the end but I enjoyed it. Good stuff.

If you are committed to pissing off your employees, but can’t quite find the way to do so, you can follow these rules and achieve success.

via 8 rules to discourage your employees | Geek Stuff Daily.

This is one of those things that’s not funny haha, but funny sad.

I’ve been thinking more and more about management recently after the JavaPosse Roundup. I’ll go into that more later but it’s funny how these kind of management things keep popping up since I’ve come back.

It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. Pick 30 startups that eminent angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars if they’ll relocate to your city, and see what happens after a year. If they seem to be thriving, you can try importing startups on a larger scale.

via Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe..

When I first moved to Albuquerque almost 15 years ago now, I heard talk of it being “Silicon Mesa“. For a giant geek like me, that was exciting talk. Especially since Albuquerque was Podunk as far as I was concerned, having grown up in San Diego. (I don’t think of it that way any more, so you don’t have to send me hate comments.) But that talk was just hype, basically. We have good tech companies here but nothing like a Silicon Valley culture I don’t think.

This idea of Paul Graham’s though, could make Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa.

It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco. Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as “hip” and “tolerant,” or as reflecting “traditional values?” Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home? If you answered yes to all these questions, you might be able not only to pull off this scheme, but to do it for less than a million per startup.

Albuquerque meets all of these criteria, to some extent. We’re tolerant and pretty hip, even according to outsiders like Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class. UNM is a good school, and New Mexico Tech is a great geek school and only an hour away in a city nobody in their right mind wants to live in (sorry Socorro, it’s true). There are a lot of walkable neighborhoods and downtown is coming along nicely. Plus, we have an extremely low cost of living and the weather is livable, even for people like me that grew up in shorts and tshirts.

A plan like this could not only attract startups from outside of New Mexico, but it would certainly help a few startups stay here instead of living for the West Coast. Even for New Mexico, this isn’t a lot of money. Paul talks about giving the startups anywhere from half a million to a million and I think we could do a lot closer to half. That would buy a good standard of living for the founders, and hardware easily. The deal could even include the big data center, BigByte, and give the startups a discount on internet access since they’ll almost certainly be internet companies. Sheesh, give me and some of my friends half a million and we’d have all kind of stuff built in no time. :)

I would absolutely love to see something like this happen, just to get that startup feel in town. That kind of energy would help really get downtown kicked into high gear and would help the areas around UNM as well for sure. Yeah, it would cost millions but unless the absolute wrong startups were chosen, I don’t think it could help but give back to the city.

If one of the 3 people who reads this happens to become the next mayor, get Paul Graham on the phone first thing and get this thing started!