Topic Archive
Browsing all posts in Conversations.
April 18th, 2009
Since creating TweetSharp, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a lot of folks who are using it to build their Twitter projects, which is great to hear. Most developers feel that a) the current state of the union for Twitter clients like Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl, TweetDeck and hootsuite, blu and Witty, just doesn’t do “all of the things I’d want a Twitter client to do”. And this is fair criticism, since client developers can’t possibly anticipate every use for Twitter, and new uses are emerging all the time.
The most common use for TweetSharp has been to accelerate the development…
Continue reading "Why Twitter clients don’t matter" »
January 19th, 2009
In a social application there are always two domains: the domain you define, or the ‘problem’ domain, and the social domain. A video-sharing web application, for instance, has no problem domain. Its entire story can be described within the social domain: it has users, videos, possibly forums, possibly blogs, possibly syndication of content. In other words, there are patterns we can apply that allow us to describe this system to a framework without writing any code, at least not code that isn’t contained within some higher API-level abstraction. If we aren’t there today, then we should move in that…
Continue reading "People + Media + Messages = Social" »
November 13th, 2008
I spend a great deal of time reading and trying to understand technologies and methodologies that radiate outward in the software development industry and the bulk of these efforts are bundled under the banner of better, faster, cheaper; the reply from the passionate or the dangerous is usually “you can have better, faster, or cheaper, but you can only pick two”.
Whether we like it or not, all great software is built slowly. If it’s also true that a software project is completed quickly, that’s a bonus. Nothing in your project that was built fast works well. If it does, it’s…
Continue reading "Slow software: open source and the cult of speed" »
November 2nd, 2008
In the midst of apparent financial uncertainty, when only the projects with the highest potential for quick return on investment in the shortest delivery time seem to make the cut, there is a way that software companies can ensure they are delivering world class services, without requiring drastic change. And on top of that, they can attract first class developers to help them get there.
Start sharing
The amount of code duplication present within even one organization, especially one structured as a consulting practice, where contracts are typically forged as work-for-hire (when all intellectual property claims to the produced work transfer…
Continue reading "How companies can find and keep the best developers in the world" »
October 28th, 2008
If we push the idea further that technology is the least important aspect of your next startup, then we can extend further to consider that “social networking”, the phenomenon that it is, is misinterpreted to mean a subset of web application features that have become standard and required in your projects.
While it might be obvious to most, we can start by making a distinction between three terms that more or less overlap in every conversation about building a modern web application where there is a entrepreneurial and social spirit behind the scenes.
Web 2.0
The concept of Web 2.0 (October 2004…
Continue reading "Social networking doesn’t mean features" »
Socialized