mcoyle.botonomy.com

Why is TextMate so popular?

TextMate won the 2006 Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Developer Tool. Congrats to Allan and everyone who has contributed to the project.

I was a Vim guy for many years, and recently made the jump to TextMate. I’ve had a few false starts in the past, going back to what’s familiar, but I’ve completed the transition in less than 210 days. (Applause).

There are a couple reasons why I switched. Most important was my belief that while Vim is great at slicing/dicing text, TextMate was built for slicing/dicing higher-level concepts and structures expressed in text. I convinced myself that the context-awareness and snippet-fu that TextMate brings to the table would lead me to be more productive in the long run.

TextMate brings to the commoditized world of text editing what OS X has brought to the commoditized world of operating systems. I think that the tastes and preferences that lead a developer to buy into and evangelize the Mac platform are the same ones that lead that same developer to buy and evangelize TextMate.

A quick analogy: If you look at text editors as operating systems, then TextMate is the OS X of Text OSes. Much like OS X takes the power of Unix and makes it lickably good looking and easy to use, TextMate has taken shell script pipelining and built the necessary abstractions required to profoundly flatten the learning curve.

But, you may rightly say, Emacs has had rich programmability for years. Any Emacs (or Vim, for that matter) guru can duplicate many of the functions that TextMate provides. Not only that, they can take the list of reasons why their editor is arguably better, have the items psychoanalyzed, and emailed to you in an encrypted file, all without leaving the confines of their Text OS, er, text editor.

My response? “Exactly.”

Any Emacs guru can and will do those things, and they will be very happy and productive in the process. Vim, Emacs, and TextMate are all great editors. It’s no longer a matter of what’s the best editor, but rather, what is the best editor for you?

I think that Emacs is the Linux of the Text OS world, whereas TextMate is the OS X of the Text OS world.

Specifically, the things that make users pick TextMate over Emacs are precisely the types of things that make a user pick OS X over Ubuntu Linux as their operating system of choice.

So once a developer makes the deliberate move to OS X, making the subsequent jump to being a TextMate customer is both easy to do and consistent with their underlying value system.

So that’s why Allan has sold scads of licenses. He’s built a great product that strongly resonates with many of the tastes and preferences of his entire target market.

Or…maybe it’s just that the Rails and TurboGears screencasts were flat-out cool. What do I know?

Debit Card Monopoly: The “New Coke” of the boardgame business

I wouldn’t fret too much regarding the news that Monopoly will be replacing cash with Visa-designed debit cards.

Now, I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but I think that the Parker Brothers don’t know their thimble from a hole in the ground if they think that replacing Monopoly money with debit cards is a good idea. Besides, what will Canadians use in their vending machines?

Our entertainment overlords at Hasbro are just setting us up for inflated prices for “Monopoly Classic”, when it makes its glorious return. They are already counting on us waxing nostalgic for getting paid in $1s and $5s when little Bobby saunters into the beautiful hotel you built at Casa Del Ventnor

Tedium, we hardly knew ye.

Besides, I don’t understand the parents that would buy a cashless Monopoly game to begin with. I mean, Monopoly is a little slice of traditional, old-time Americana. Just last night, we sat around our well-worn Monopoly game for hours. You know, the Bass Fishing Lakes Edition.

I hear that they also have one related to Las Vegas. Or maybe it was Atlantic City.

I forget.

These days, there is a special edition of the game for every movie, city, sports team, hobby, special interest, and topical skin condition. Obviously, brand integrity is not important to either of the Parker Brothers. Seriously, you could drop a half-packet of Splenda into a Big Gulp-sized cistern of coffee, and still have less dilution than the Monopoly brand. What gives, muchachos? I mean Peter Parker is obviously busy at night, but the other one, he has no excuse.

I was at the toy store the other day trying to buy Monopoly for my nephew. I had to ask the kid at the front desk where they kept the Monopoly edition of Monopoly. His answer: 1987.

This latest move is a pure unadulterated marketing move by Visa. I can already picture their commercial after the “Debit Card” Monopoly hits the stores:

• Board Game: $15
• Movie Rental: $4
• Zipping through the tedious parts of the board game so that you can put the kids to bed and watch the movie: Priceless

Family board games are all about the process of playing and spending time together, not Tivo-ing through the gameplay to get to the end. Plus, the swapping of cash among family members is a time-honored tradition. As well as a great (achoo!) way of teaching the youngins to wash their hands after handling money. You never know who touched it last.

At the end of the day, if little Mandy doesn’t grow up learning how to manage her own cash in the cocoon-like setting of the typical family Monopoly game (cheating, temper tantrums, and wicked accusations aside), she’ll end up like the other Bratz dolls dancing at the Community Chest.

You know, it’s that charming little joint at the corner of Baltic and Mediterranean Ave.

And evidently the last place in Atlantic City where Monopoly money still reigns.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

(With obvious apologies to Dennis)

Also, with apologies to Canada. I had never heard of the Monopoly/Canadian money analogy before this morning. But the line popped into my head and I had to run with it, eh?

Project Management is not (just) Task Management

How did The Little Ol’ Company From Redmond set the project management world back decades?

They named their product Microsoft Project when it should have been Microsoft Tasks.

This marketing coup has has a profound impact on the business world, because many people now think that a project plan is a file with .mpp extension. The focus on Task Management at the expense of Risk Management has profound implications on the way projects are planned and executed. However, it’s Microsoft’s implicit market dominance, not some evil conspiratorial plot, that has inadvertently led the world astray.

Let me give you a quick, hypothetical example. Let’s say that Wal-Mart grew to the point where they were responsible for 90% of all retail business. In this world, Wal-Mart isn’t a place to shop, it’s the place to shop. When people think “store”, or “shopping”, they equate it with Wal-Mart. In fact, a majority of people have never seen a store that wasn’t a Wal-Mart.

Given this virtual monopoly, Wal-Mart then goes and builds out a very successful private label line of products. Lots of people shampoo with with WM CleanHair, kill insects with WM BugZap, etc.

Unfortunately, when they release their new private label wood stain, they call it WM WoodRefinish. Their market dominance has most people equating the job of furniture refinishing with the use of the WoodRefinish product. Heck, lots of people buy the product, and it turns their wood table into a slightly darker wood table. Success-amundo in their eyes.

Now you have lots of people who think that refinishing a piece of wood furniture is a matter of using a bottle of WM WoodRefinish. They don’t realize at first that stripping, sanding and surface prepping are the important parts of a good refinishing job. Maybe that’s why over 80% of all furniture refinishing jobs seem to take longer and yield poorer quality than expected.

But it’s not the fault of the WM WoodRefinish product. It’s perfectly good wood stain. Plus, the focus groups and marketing folks thought that “WoodRefinish” was a good name for the product.

The catastrophic failure lies in the false perception of the consumer that “applying stain” == “refinishing wood”.

Which brings us back to my central argument: Project management is not about task management, it is about risk management. Using the above analogy, the Gantt chart is the wood stain, but dependency analysis and risk management is the sanding and stripping. They are the time-consuming, labor-intensive precursors to a realistic, good looking Gantt chart.

This is why ProjectPipe is Risk-based, rather than Task-based. It intentionally isn’t centered around building Gantt charts, instead integrating with MS Project for Gantt chart creation.

Rather, ProjectPipe focuses on helping you build links and dependencies among your requirements, issues, tasks, etc. Once you understand how everything fits together, you will have a much better sense for the real tasks that you need to execute and the milestones that demonstrate real progress.

Using a risk-driven, dependency-centric approach, your task list and risk list probably won’t be perfect out-of-the-gate, but they won’t be arbitrary either.

Or, you could just just bang out a list of tasks, guesstimate their duration, wire up their finish and start dates, generate a pretty picture of cascading rectangles, then kick back and call it a day.

It’s up to you.

Quicksilver

If you own a Mac and haven’t tried Quicksilver, you may be doing yourself a profound disservice. Quicksilver is a smart application switcher / desktop workflow tool. Here’s a better explanation.

I’m pretty much using it for doing simple stuff like opening apps and finding files, but it seems that once you achieve Quicksliver guru status, you could rip through reasonably complex multi-step workflows like kids pull off long Tekken combos, in that the heavy lifting can be relegated to muscle memory.
After using it for a few weeks now, I’d have a real tough time getting rid of it.

I just installed the Cube interface, and although it’s arguably just eye candy, that UI seems more Quicksilver-ish (or true to itself) than the other interface options. Here’s a movie of the cube in action, recorded by Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings.

On Stealth Mode

One of the benefits of having Approach.Botonomy.Com (A.B.C) up and running is that the A.B.C site is now the repository for much of our reference-worthy content. A.B.C is where we are communicating our opinions and beliefs on topics ranging from the rise of folksonomies in project management to the mainstreaming of dynamic programming languages.

That frees up my weblog for much more casual personal observations and such. A quick analogy: If Approach.Botonomy.Com is the legitimate theatre, then my personal weblog is late night basic cable reruns of Sanford and Son.

Or so I would hope.

So, speaking of of uninteresting things that I do, I was at Costco over the weekend, picking up a few gallons of relish and a 12 pack of fire extinguishers. As I was making my way past a throng of 20 people waiting in line for a spoonful of lentil soup, I ran into a guy that I went to grade school with. He too is working on a online startup. He said that he was looking to launch in 6-8 months and is keeping the concept very close to the vest.

Mmm, stealth mode.

Been there. Done that. Have the “I missed out on important early feedback” t-shirt to prove it.

Now, in all fairness, I had already told my former classmate that my company was in the online app business. Perhaps if I was a podiatrist or was slinging hash at the local Denny’s he’d have been more open, but that’s irrelevant. This is not about being nosy, and I wish the guy and his team all the luck in the world. Rather, I bring it up because it was a moment of clarity for me, as I realized how my views on the nature of the “killer idea” has changed over the last year.

Here’s my current take on running your micro-ISV startup in stealth mode: At first glance, it seems kinda cool. Just like cranking the radio on your car stereo when you’re cruising around at the ripe old age of 16 maybe seemed cool at the time. If you don’t get loud music out of your system early on as a teenager, you’ll do irreparable damage to your hearing.

Fast-forward the clock 20 years, and if you’re doing a small startup and don’t get the mystique of “stealth mode” out of your system early on, you might end up figuratively too deaf to listen for early stage questions, comments, and concerns. Maybe even some that might otherwise have a profound impact on your business model and prospects for a timely success.

In hindsight, I now realize that the incremental benefit that you receive from getting an arbitrary outsider’s initial reaction to your idea far, far outweighs the low incremental risk of someone ripping off your idea and beating you senseless with it in the marketplace.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I have to run back to Costco.  We are going to have hot dogs for lunch, and l must have left my gallon of mustard in the cart.

The Client/Server Renaissance

Don Dodge has an interesting analysis of Ray Ozzie’s recent Tech•Ed speech.

I think that there will be four key drivers of this movement back to the client/server world, none of which involve dusting off your old PowerBuilder books (not that there’s anything wrong with that):

1. Tools like the iTunes Music Store and (our very own) ProjectPipe.com will leverage and blend web technologies and existing desktop infrastructure, so that the underlying, infrastructure-spanning solution “just works”.
2. A platform for desktop-level, consumer-friendly “mashup”-type applications, that glue together RSS feeds, web services, and local data in interesting and useful ways. This will probably be some sort of Firefox extension.
3. Microsoft Live, and the ecosystem that springs up around it.
4. The movement toward desktop web applications. I think that two factors will drive this:
   • The continued growth of rapid web dev frameworks, such as TurboGears and Ruby on Rails, which increases the supply-side (i.e. developers, ISVs) opportunity cost of not using one of these frameworks when building an application.
   • The maturity and growing popularity of embedded databases such as Sqlite, which considerably simplifies the deployment footprint for such applications.

Don states that “The seamless, blended, client-server-services approach makes intuitive sense.” I couldn’t agree more. This was one of the core problems that we set out to solve in ProjectPipe, since so much project activity occurs on the desktop, yet so much collaboration occurs over the Internet.

We’ve referred to this blend of “Thin Client” (web) and “Thick Client” (client/server) as our Right Client Architecture, where we let the user pick the right tool for the job, and we figure out how to do the integration. For a real-world example, read about how ProjectPipe integrates with MS Project and Excel.

Introducing Approach.Botonomy.Com

We rolled out a new site yesterday called Approach.Botonomy.Com. It is a cross between an blog and a knowledge base of project management and software development topics.

We wanted to create a way for prospective clients and partners to get a sense of Botonomy’s approach to project management and software development. But we didn’t want to just whip up some fluffy marketing prose accompanied by stock photos of a group of people we’ve never met sitting around a conference room table we’ve never sat at reviewing a project plan we never worked on.

Rather, we wanted to provide living commentary on the classical issues affecting project teams and IT organizations, as well as our $.02 on the relevant issues of the day. Hopefully, the soundness of our arguments and consistency of our philosophy will shine through the occasional longwindedness and bad spellin.

We also wanted to put together a resource that could be used to educate those coming up in the IT ranks. I’m a big fan of books like The Pragmatic Programmer, and Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming. Those are great books that provide sage advice in terms of programming and thinking about programming. But I never found anything like that that addressed some of the broader challenges facing technology consultants and IT folk in general. I am not saying that our humble website is in the same league as these classic texts, but we aspire to help those coming after us, just as those books aided scores of current IT professionals (and will continue to do so, I might add).

While Newton saw farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, we’d like to at least lend a beat-up footstool to the new kids.

From an implementation perspective, we identified a dozen concepts that are central to successful technical project delivery and risk management (focus, client relations, source control, etc.). For each of these topics, we’ll build out the following:

• An Introduction
• Our Opinions on the topic
• Short Stories that illustrate a point about the topic
• Advice, Tips, and Tricks related to the topic
• Links to current news, articles, blog posts, etc. that are related to the topic

Since it’s built atop a blog engine, it’s tricked out with RSS for the site and the individual Topics or Content Types. Every entry is tagged with a Topic, and a Content Type (Intro, Opinion, Story, etc.). This allows for a multi-dimensional view of the content as depicted below:

We have some content already published, and other stuff in various states of completion. If you’d like to see an example, here is a Story about New Technology: Your Project is Not the Science Fair

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Evidently, Scientists Have Identified Basic Principles of Communications. The theory goes that even though you read/listen one word at a time, your brain builds out a hierarchical tree of concepts, based upon its ability to group and arrange words and thoughts.

If you are at all a fan of O’Reilly’s Mind Hacks book, you’ll find the article interesting.

In the context of that article, here are two key reasons why ProjectPipe makes project data management easier:

• Everything in ProjectPipe can be managed as an outline. If your brain ultimately manages inbound communication as a hierarchy, then we’re saving the ol’ noggin a bit of work by setting up a tree-like hierarchy for your data in the first place
• Everything in ProjectPipe can be categorized with Tags. Tagging provides multi-dimensional data management without all the scary data modeling lingo. This is real useful for those cases where one or more pieces of data crosscut a number of discrete topical hierarchies in the larger, multidimensional “web of ideas”

While IANAPOLR (I am not a Physicist or Language Researcher), I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that presenting non-trivial information as an outline or hierarchy in the first place saves a great deal of the language parsing and structural encoding effort relative to the same information being presented in prose or a flat list.

In other words, organization accelerates cognition.

All I Really Need to Know About Startups I learned from D&D, Part I

Like many others that somehow stumbled into the technology business, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a kid.

In D&D, one of the things that you do when creating your character is roll dice to determine the physical and mental capabilities of your character, based upon six attributes. To do this, you roll a six-sided die (i.e. 1/2 of a pair of plain ‘ol dice) 3X, yielding a score between 3-18. In this way, you’re essentially playing craps at the Genetics Casino, and your character turns out to be the winner or loser. The attributes are:

• Strength
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Dexterity
• Constitution
• Charisma

Even though I haven’t played in over 20 years, it just dawned on me the other day that you could evaluate a startup using these same six criteria. Plus, a startup is already somewhat of a roll of the dice to begin with. So, here is a walkthrough of the six character attributes from D&D, and how I see them mapping to the characteristics of a startup:

• Strength: In the game, this refers to the physical strength of your characters. In a startup, Strength is the “bang-for-the-buck” that your product/service delivers. A strong offering can go so far as to alter the very market in which it competes. A weak offering wilts to death quietly in the corner, unnoticed by the marketplace. In both cases, Strength helps open doors.
• Intelligence:
  In the game, this refers to the raw intellect that your character possesses. In the startup world, this refers to how well your company understands the problem that you are addressing and the markets that you serve.
• Wisdom: In the game, Wisdom measures your character’s insight and perceptiveness. In the startup world, this refers to your ability to make sound judgement calls. In particular, I believe that startup Wisdom is all about picking the right problem to try to solve. Set your sights too big, and you end up trying to “boil the ocean” in vain, such as having a grandiose mission to fundamentally change the way people shop for gasoline. Set your sights too small, and you end up niche-ing yourself to death, such as aspiring to be South Dakota’s leading source for Officially Licensed Leonard Part 6 merchandise.Those problems that are “Big enough to be interesting, but small enough to be successful” are the domain of the wise entrepreneur.
• Dexterity: In the game, Dexterity is a measurement of your fine motor skills. This comes in handy when dodging arrows or picking locks. In a startup, Dexterity is a measure of your ability to adapt to change, as dictated by your customers, competitors, or in some cases, your better judgement.
• Constitution: In the game, this refers to the health and vitality of your character, and it contributes to the amount of beatdown that your character can sustain before assuming room temperature (i.e. running out of Hit Points). In startups, Constitution refers to your ability to repeatedly take on challenges and overcome adversity in a sustainable fashion. While financial health is the obvious analogy in startup land, I also believe that the robustness of the founders’ relationship is the other key aspect of having a healthy startup constitution.
• Charisma: In the game, this refers to the physical attractiveness and persuasiveness of your character. Characters with strong charisma are better leaders, and can influence fellow travellers, townspeople, and even some adversaries. In a startup, the firm’s measure of Charisma is not solely on the shoulders of shiny fast-talking sales folk, as there aren’t enough Herb Tarleks to go around (be thankful for the small things in life). Rather, the Charisma of your startup is also measured by the attractiveness of your message, the attention to detail in your product/service, and the polish and consistency of your marketing collateral. Oh, and having a decent looking and informative web presence ain’t a bad idea, either.

The nice thing about this model is that it provides a handy list of characteristics that are somewhat familiar to a decent number of people (particularly in the technology space), as the game has been around for decades. I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that these attributes, given the proper mapping from role-playing game to business, could be used to drive a MECE-esque qualitative analysis of a startup.

Tune in next time, and we’ll take a look at a couple of hypothetical startups, and see how they’d stack up in D&D-speak.

Skeletons in the (Software Architecture) Closet

ITConversations recently published an OSCON 2005 session by David Heinemeier Hansson titled Secrets behind Ruby on Rails.

Even if you’re not a Ruby developer (which I’m not at the moment), this podcast episode is 16 minutes well-spent. In defending his position that “flexibility is overrated”, David makes the following comment:

“Too many technologists are chasing flexibility as thus it was free. It is not.”

Amen.

There’s no shortage of developers and architects who not only err on the side of configurability and/or future-proofing, but cut the wheel and swerve hard in that direction. My counter-arguments and counsel have traditionally drawn upon the Extreme Programming credo of YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It), and the Zen of Python, among other software writings to complement my first-person experiences. The rapid adoption and success of Rails provides additional points of reference that are well-grounded not just in theory, but in the heads-down, pragmatic implementations that moves our craft forward.

Even if you are not working on a Rails project, there are software architecture lessons to be learned from the successes and challenges that the Rails community faces as it moves through its adolescence.

I like to make the analogy that application architecture is much like a skeleton. It’s comprised of bones and joints. Bones are the well-defined elements of the application, the behaviors of the application that are well-understood, and therefore can be built rigid and strong. Joints are the points of flexion, accounting for uncertainty and/or future change either through dynamic behavior or external configuration.

IMO, the challenge of good software architecture lies in the proper layout of bones and joints in building the skeleton of your application.

If you have too much bone and too few joints, your architecture is unnaturally rigid, and making change involves literally breaking a bone and then coding your way through its repair.

Conversely, if you have too many joints and too few bones, your application will not have enough internal structure to stand on its own. Now your application probably needs to lean on an XML Configuration-based walker just to stand upright. It doesn’t get much less agile that that, metaphorically speaking.

The other issue that frequently arises is the misplacement of flexion points, making the application flexible in areas when far simpler solutions would suffice, and hardcoding specific behavior where flexibility is genuinely useful.

The classic example of misplaced flexibility is the case where an architect in a solid 100% Oracle (or 100% Microsoft) shop designs a complicated and opaque “data abstraction layer”, so that the application would require minimal changes in the event that the company nullifies long standing enterprise vendor relationships at some point in the future and forces the migration of all legacy applications built atop database vendor A to now run atop database vendor B, and the company chooses to not leverage such a seismic event to refactor, rewrite, or retire said application. In this example, the codebase is encumbered (and a chunk of the budget depleted) in the interest of building functionality that addresses a risk that is very, very unlikely to materialize.

If you’re that forward thinking, you might as well code your application to be flexible enough to address the Y10K Bug

By treating your application architecture as a skeleton, you will hopefully be able to put flexibility in your application where it makes sense, and reduce the risk that well-intentioned but misplaced flexibility becomes a skeleton in your application’s closet.

P.S. While some may consider the previous sentence to be a mixed metaphor, I disagree. Given the “Web 2.0″ world in which we’re living, I prefer to think of it as a Metaphor Mashup.