dante.cassanego.net

2010 Goals

January is a natural for me to reflect not only because it is the start of a new year, but because it is my bday month.  As i look back at my last year’s goals, although I didn’t hit every one in the way that I envisioned, i think, overall 2009 was a pretty good year.  Let’s take a look:

I made (and am still making) a couple attempts to get involved in a volunteer organization.  So far, they haven’t really achieved the “deep involvement” bar that i set for myself.  In the product creation category, i’d give myself a B.  Lasso definitely has active users, but i’m not so sure about passionate.  Most importantly, I learned a LOT from the experience and am applying that knowledge to my future work.  Unfortunately, I did not build a local product team.  While i’ve made lots of new techie friends at carrboro coworking, there has not been an opportunity to co-develop new ideas.  I did start and run an RIA user group.  i’ve let it slide a bit of late, but i’m planning on restarting it soon.  I did another century.  check!  Last but not least, i read 11 books last year.  that is really good for me!  I hope to keep up that pace.

okay, so enough of last year.  Looking forward, here are some of the things i’d like to accomplish this year:

• Keep reading! same pace as last year, keep increasing the diversity of topics
• Cycling. Since i don’t know my summer plans yet, i can’t commit to a century; however, I want to ride an average of 1/mo in the winter and 3/mo over the summer
• Complete two significant Arduino projects.  I’ve always been fascinated by home electronics.  This is the year when I start making them!
• Stay in shape! Last year, I did a very good job of keeping in shape thanks in no small part to Sarah’s vegetarian diet.  I am happy with my current weight and want to stay here

This year’s goals are markedly less interesting than last year.  This year has the potential to be an interesting one professionally speaking.  I’m excited for it, but it means that i know less about how to plan out my year’s goals.  Perhaps a mid-year update is in order.  I’ll make myself a note to check back in June…

Do the Simplest Thing You Possibly Can

This post borrows ideas from TPS and metacool but hopes to bring ideas to these ideas to life with a concrete example.

Right now at work, we have a project that seeks to get a better understanding of how small businesses could use voice technology to organize workers and streamline process.  Very cool, cutting edge stuff and quite complicated.  In fact, in order to work with businesses, I’m going to have to set up a VOIP line for each…

BZZZT!!

Wait just one minute here.  Whats the goal? To understand how small businesses can use voice technology (VOIP, transcription, recognition, etc).  Okay, but is it possible to achieve the goal without actually bothering with the technology?  Seems silly, but in this case it actually is.

In fact, I can provide any one person with a state-of-the-art voice recognition system lightyears beyond what’s on the market today with just 5 minutes of work.  All I need is a home telephone line, an answering machine, and my brain (which happens to be able to process audio files, extract semantic meaning, and transcribe to text).  See, in this case, voice technology has actually nothing to do with the problem you are solving.  It has everything to do with scale.  But when you are just trying to prove that there is a business case, the technology really doesn’t matter.

Now before someone thinks I’m advocating for the proliferation of vaporware, I’m not.  You’ve gotta love the technology too.  Before you get all excited that you’ve just invented the next gazillion dollar industry just because you know how to use an answering machine and can speak english, you need to know that you can get the technology to work.

But my suggestion is this: first, do the simplest thing you possibly can.  prototype your solution.  Then, with all the time you have leftover (because how hard is it to answer phones?) get a real grip on the technology.  Once you have a good understanding of both the customer problem and the technical solution, then you are free to get excited.

Comparing Cairngorm and Model View ViewModel

Several months ago at our RIA meetup, I presented a short comparison of two client-side flex architectures: Cairngorm and Model View ViewModel. I’ve used both of these architectures in large-scale production projects, but for the purpose of simple comparison, I decided to demonstrate the two designs by implementing an identical application twice – once in each architecture.

If you aren’t familiar with the basics of these two RIA architecture patterns you can learn more here:

• Cairngorm Home
• Model View ViewModel (MVVM) applied to WPF

This post will not cover the basics of these two patters, quick google searches will reveal lots of that type of information. Rather, below, you’ll find links to the code for the two – functionally equivalent – RSS reader applications followed by a quick highlight comparison of how these two patterns compare.

To get started, grab the two projects: Cairngorm and MVVM. As you look through the code, note a few things:

• I know it’s not perfect. This was done pretty quickly, and the group had the benefit of me explaining my intent as i went along
• I know it’s too simple. This RSS reader example is really too simplistic to be considered a true demonstration of these two architectures. The application is really just a starting point for comparison rather than an exhaustive stress test. My comparisons and analysis is drawn more from previous experience than it is from the code that i post here.

That being said here are the major points for comparison:

• Decoupling vs Clarity.  In general, Cairngorm – with it’s highly event-based architecture – decouples your view and your logic code more than MVVM does.  But that comes at a cost.  In Cairngorm, I often find it more difficult to trace the origin – and destination – of events.  Additionally, vanilla Cairngorm asks you to create a class for every single event in your system.  If you have a large system, that’s A LOT of events.  They eventually get confusing.  MVVM has less of this, but with the trade off that you need to be careful about putting too much logic or “smarts” in your ViewModel classes.  You need to find ways to decouple this logic without breaking the pattern
• View Helpers vs ViewModels. When it comes down to it, despite what the flex docs (and my examples) seem to imply, more often than not, you’ll need to write code that interprets responses from the server before display.  In MVVM, the path to do this is relatively certain.  When a model is updated, your ViewModel hears the change, interprets the response, and passes the message on to the view.  With Cairngorm, if your goal is to keep logic outside of the MXML, you’ll likely need to write separate response classes that massage model data first and then place the data into the view.
• Emphasis on Binding. While data binding can – and should – be used in both frameworks, MVVM really emphasizes data binding for just about everything.  In a well-factored MVVM view, everything, down to button state is bound to the ViewModel.  While this can be tedious at times, if you design your ViewModel classes well, this gives you a tremendous ability to do very comprehensive unit testing and have high confidence in the quality of your application.

I hope this was a helpful introductory overview of these two architectures.  Bottom line: they are both good but be sure to use your judgment when applying them.  Taken to an extreme, each has weaknesses.

Deadlines need a bite

Now i don’t mean this quite as literally as pictured here, and this may seem obvious after I say it, but recently I asked myself the question:

“Why do deadlines work?”

It’s pretty common knowledge that in order to make progress on any project a team needs deadlines to more forward, but why?  Why are people so bad getting work done in the absence of a deadline?

My answer came to me in a bit of a round about way.  Our team had a deadline that we did not hit.  Everyone knew what what had to be done, they even had enough time to do it, but when the day came and went, the work was not done.  Clearly, there could be 100s of reasons for this, but after i reflected on it for a while one in particular stands out for me.

We did not set up a face to face review.

My thesis is the following: knowing a deadline just isn’t enough.  Deadlines are just dates on a calendar unless people feel social pressure to get something done.  No one likes disappointing their team, and they especially don’t like looking teammates in the eye when they disappoint.  So when we talk about deadlines, perhaps it would be best to frame them in the form of a review meeting.  “Are we going to hit our report out to the boss?”  To me, that is the real bite behind a deadline: social pressure.

It doesn’t have to be a negative thing of course.  I would never want a team where there was unrealistic or antagonistic social pressure.  However, I think a recognition that a little social pressure in a team setting is the real magic behind deadlines will help me to craft more effective ones.

Be Specific!

I think i’m developing a bit of a split personality.  Before jumping to conclusions, let me tell you what I mean.  In one part of my life, abstraction is king.  As a programmer, your ability to recognize, comprehend, and apply abstraction is a fundamental tool in your toolkit.  Without abstraction – and proper application of it – large programs would be utterly incomprehensible.  They would be just a mix of random words and numbers without any means of interpretation.

But on the other hand, in the realm of business, I’m finding that abstraction can be quite dangerous.  Abstraction – and it’s evil cousin, vagueness – lead to all to many long meetings, or worse, miscommunication.

When communicating – with words, not code – I try my best to support everything with specific examples.  This can be hard to do sometimes, and i certainly don’t always succeed, but specificity in language is – i think – a good goal to strive for.

So in the interest of following my own advice, here’s an example of what I mean (it would be a pretty ironic post if i ended with the last paragraph, huh ):

This evening I sent out an email to our RIA meetup group.  I was asking for input on our next topic.  Specifically, I need two people to prepare some examples of UI design patterns they have followed when using RIAs.  Rather than just leaving the request at that, I provided an example about how my team used a JS call to caution the user away from hitting the back button and therefore losing all their work.

I hope that this specific example helped to clarify my request and hopefully made the task seem easier than it would have been if i had just left my request in a general form.

You have examples of how clarity in communication has helped you?

ps. the picture is totally random

Learning about Silverlight

On Thursday, the Carrboro RIA Meetup had it’s latest installment of RIA learning.  Rob Zelt, (and here) an expert on Silverlight and MS web technologies shared the basiscs of Silverlight with our group.  Thanks very much to Rob for sharing with the group!  It was a great session where I think everyone learned a lot.

Here are some of my key takeaways from the session:

• Silverlight has a stunningly powerful ability to skin and layout components without touching a single line of logic code.
• The “old” arguments that flash has such a wide install base it will be hard for MS to catch up are starting to be less relevant.  The Silverlight install base is growing and growing fast.
• Silverlight 3 has awesome 3d rendering capabilities and will be able to deliver HD content efficiently
• Coding patterns between Silverlight and Flex are quite similar (although Cairngorm is a little different on the flex side)
• MS is working on RIA services, which seems strikingly similar to LCDS.  This is a great move as LCDS can be a great productivity boost to Flex teams

There was much more in the presentation, but these are the highlights that come to mind.  There was a suggestion at the end that we have a session where we compare building an app in Flex and Silverlight.  A great idea, and something we will definitely have to try.  If we do that, I’ll definitely post code examples here.

Thanks again to Rob!

The power of data aggregation

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing.  Now that Lasso has a first version out in the wild, my focus must shift to reaching my potential customers.  One challenge that i will have in this task is the fact that I, personally, am not a potential customer of my product (i.e. I’m not a business owner, the customer that i need to reach first).

Now, I don’t have a lot of experience in marketing (read that: none), but intuition tells me that step #1 in being a good marketer is having a deep understanding of your customer and your market.  So, the question then becomes, how do I gain deep insight into how and why business owners make decisions about how they reach out to their customers.

One of those is, of course, directly visiting businesses.  I talked about this in a previous post and it is still the #1 way to gain insight.  But unfortunately, visits take a lot of time and resources.  I want to find more ways to learn from the experts.

Being the self respecting techie that I am, I naturally turn to online resources to begin my learning process.  I’ll start finding industry blogs.  I’ll find influential + knowledgeable people on twitter.  I’ll start reading relevant news. etc.  There’s 2 problems with that approach

1. This type of knowledge seeking falls in the “know that i don’t know” category.  Useful, but I’m less likely to be surprised
2. It’s pull not push.  By that I mean, I have to seek out the information i’m looking for.  And if, for some reason, i don’t do it for a few days I am liable to miss interesting opportunities.

Enter the wonderful world of data aggregation.  This weekend, I spent about 3 hours setting up a series of data feeds that will deliver the news and information I need right to my feed reader.  Using a combination of Google Blog search, Google site search, Postrank, Twitter search, and last but not least Yahoo Pipes.  I made a very simple way to keep on top of all relevant and interesting news + articles about the restaurant industry.  The great thing is that although the breadth of information that I am pulling is quite wide, the amount of information that i have to process is pretty low (thanks to awesome services like Postrank).

Now, it’s certainly not perfect yet and i still have a lot more tweaking to do, but I’m feeling confident that, used properly, powerful tools that allow for this type of data aggregation and transformation  will (and certainly already are) positively transform the way that we think about market research.

Adobe AIR: Introduction and Overview

As I was preparing for tomorrows RIA Meetup, it dawned on me that it probably would be a good idea to use my blog as a way to both document and share the work that goes into the meetups. From now on (time permitting), every time we have a meetup, I’ll try to accompany it with a blog post.  Now on to the content:

Adobe AIR is runtime environment that liberates RIAs from the browser and brings them right onto a users desktop.  When I first heard of a AIR prior to it’s formal release, I (mistakenly) thought of it as an extension to the Flex SDK.  While this is correct in a limited sense, defining AIR in this way is too narrow.

In truth, AIR is desktop runtime that enables developers to build rich, web-enabled applications that are installed on a users OS.  Developers can build AIR apps with their choice of Flex, Flash, and even DHTML.  In the rest of this post I’ll build a case for why one would choose AIR and how AIR development differs across technology choices.

Why Choose AIR?

As you do when designing any software product, technology choices should be driven by customer requirements.  Here are some of the customer requirements that would start to point me toward AIR

• Daily use.  A customer will use your app frequently and is willing to install the application (an extra step compared to viewing a web page) because it is accessed often
• Connected.  The application relies on data out in the cloud.  It’s probably multi-user or social in some way
• Need for offline use.  If offline use is a requirement, this could be a big push to AIR (or google gears, or some other local storage technology)
• File system access.  Will the ability to read / write files on the users local machine enhance the usability or experience of the product?

Now let’s move one click down to some of the technical advandages you gain when choosing AIR

• Your product loads faster.  No SWF DL or HTML page load.  Your code is local and will boot up faster
• Multiple ways to store data including
  • File system access.  can read / write files
  • SQLite database
  • normal “browser-like” approaches like cookies
• Desktop notifications.  notify users when there is some sort of state change
• Control over the window.  Removing the standard looking window chrome does a lot more than you think to enhance the look and feel of your app.  the window can even be transparent… ooooh

Using AIR with Different Technologies

Another very cool thing about AIR is that there are multiple ways to make use of the run-time depending on your background.

If you are a Flash developer, you can use your familiar Flash CS4 product to create AIR apps.  I know the least about this option, so I’ll move on…

If you are a Flex developer (like me!) you can build an AIR app in much the same way that you would build a normal Flex app.  You have an extended API at your disposal and the configuation of the app is slightly different.  This page does a nice job of explicitly listing out all the API differences between Flex development and AIR development.  I personally will gravitate toward this option since I think Flex provides a nicer development environment and UI capabilities than DHTML when we are talking about desktop experiences.  The other cool thing is that as long as you are careful, it should be easily possible to port an app between a pure Flex browser experience and an AIR desktop experience.

Last but surely not least is DHTML.  So for all you web standards lovers out there (and i consider myself among those ranks), you can translate all your HTML / JS / CSS skills straight to the desktop and create disconnected and/or file system aware experiences.  Pretty cool stuff!  DHTML development comes with a few caveats (not the least among them is that use of eval() is limited due to security concerns.  It is overcomable, but needs to be pretty intentionally designed).  I haven’t looked, but i suspect that there are probably some pretty good JS libraries out there to make DHTML + AIR development a snap.

Getting Started and References

So there is my 2c introduction to AIR and why i think it is a truly compelling platfrom.  It is, of course, not the the answer to every problem in the world; however, for a certain subset of applications, AIR is a wonderful addition to a developer’s toolkit.

To get started with AIR, head to this adobe page and follow the directions.  In the Meetup, I plan on exploring the the APIs around windowing (including notification mechanisms in the system tray or application bar) and file read/write capability.  Obviously there is much more available, but i have a feeling we’ll be pressed for time with just that.

While preparing, i used the following very helpful references

• http://24ways.org/2007/christmas-is-in-the-air
• http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/air/
• http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AIR/1.5/devappsflex/

thanks and have fun with AIR!

Learning from customers: 3 ways to improve

Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve spent quite a bit of time doing interviews with potential customers of the product i’m working on.  I’ve done seven over the last 3 weeks and plan to do several more in the next few weeks.  I’ve had an awesome time doing all of them so far and learned a ton, not just about my product, but also about being good at doing interviews

After reflecting for a bit on what went well and what didn’t go so well, i think i have a few ‘take-aways’ that i’d like to make sure to remember for the next time around

1. The less I talk, the better

In an interview format it never ceases to amaze me how amazingly easy to lead a subject.  I don’t do this intentionally of course as my goal is to learn from them, not to lead them to whatever “answer” i think i have.  Unfortunately, on several different occasions, I asked a question or made a statement and then watched in horror as the person I was interviewing stopped, thought about what i said, and then changed course.  Ahh!  sometimes i open my mouth too quickly and unfortunately once said, you can’t take that thought back

2. Allow for “digressions”

Being the all-too-often linear person that i am, i generally get annoyed by digressions in conversation.  after all, in the case of an interview, I’m there for a specific reason right?  Well.. true but with interviews like these, digressions are actually a really powerful tool for two reasons.

First, it puts the interviewee at ease.  A quick question about something on the wall or the history of the building might not be what you take away from the interview, but it’s important to remember that the interviewee is usually nervous.  They aren’t sure if you are judging them or if there are going to give the “wrong” answer.  Digressions help them to relax.

Second, remember that there are 3 categories of knowledge: things you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know.  If you never digress, you will never uncover things in the latter category.

3. Never answer questions (at least until the end)

Usually the interviewee is really nervous about doing something “wrong”.  They often become self concious and will start reverting to asking questions.  I do my best to resist the temptation to answer them.  Many times, questions will come regarding the product (if you are showing them one), but the topics can range a great deal.

It’s best to pretend you are a politician and just deflect the question.  “what do you think that means?” or even at times a little white lie like “i’m not sure” will help avoid the inevitable leading that will occur if you answer a specific question.  after all, you’re not going to be sitting there with them when they are actually trying your product

anyway, I’m still definitely just a beginner at customer inteviews, but i hope that this is a skill that i can continue to develop as i know that deep customer insight is a key ingredient to innovation, and speaking with customers is the main ingredient to deep customer insight!

Meetup and Me

Being totally new to an to an area is difficult.  It’s difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is not having connections to people.  Although it took me a long time to realize it about myself, I thrive off of having people around.  I enjoy listening, learning, and just talking with people that I know well, or am meeting for the first time.

When you are new to an area, opportunites to meet and talk to people seem limited.  It’s really easy to feel isolated.  However, it’s also an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t have “normally” done when you are in your comfort zome.

For me, Meetup has been an amazing resource for becoming more comfortable in my new location.  I’ve found people with common interests and genuine desires to learn.

Last week, I took the plunge and started my own Meetup on Rich Internet Applications.  We had our first meeting on thursday.  There were 3 people in total.  Not exactly a huge turnout, but I’m encouraged that there is some level of interest.  It is great that I can meet a couple people who I would have no way of meeting otherwise and have a two hour long discussion about a topic that i love.

I’m definitely a newly minted big fan of meetup, and i’m looking forward to many more meetups in the future.