The 80/20 Rule

Following my previous statement ‘coding is fun’, I had some long coding hours which reminded me the complexity of developing a real product.

The first thing coming to mind is the 80/20 rule – it takes 20% of the time to complete 80% of the product but the remaining 20% take the rest 80% (there are several variations of this rule).
In practice, developing a cool demo is relatively easy. Many sources/samples are available on the web. The underline platforms do provide much of the basic functionality needed. Cutting corners is fine (actually it is a must). And it is clear who will click where and when.
But… converting it to a real product is a different story. Dealing with edge-cases, ensuring scalability to support many users, ensuring the architecture will be extendable in future releases, working on a pixel perfect UI and many other activities take much more time than the first quick-and-dirty demo.

So, is the statement ‘Coding is fun’ still correct? I would still say yes, mainly because of the satisfaction of creating something using your two hands (keyboard and a mouse).

The context of that is the initiative I’m working on – it is going to be shipped next week! As the first user to work with it I can ‘objectively’ say it’s a great product.
As the application monitors a run (among other things it does), it is challenging to test the scalability to deal with large data as you need to actually record the run. Therefore on last Saturday I ‘had’ to run 18km. Any volunteers for testing a marathon :-)

Users

One might claim that users can be a real pain - they have requests, find bugs and cause you deal with boring maintenance tasks rather than developing the next version. It is probably true, but…

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

So – “If a product was developed and no one uses it, does it exist?”

Following the previous post (coding is fun), I believe it is much more fun when real users use what you coded (and of course like it).
A few days ago I found out that my ‘first Facebook application’ was downloaded and used by ~100 people. It was a very pleasant surprise.

This is one of the advantages when targeting end-users and not huge companies (consumer vs. enterprise) – the cycles are very short and you can have your product being used by users very fast.

Leveraging this advantage, we are going to ship in a few weeks our first Android application.
To double the fun, the idea of the application is based on my other hobby – running. More details to follow…

Happy Hanukkah, Mary Christmas and Happy New Year!

Coding is Fun

At SAP I spent the last few years mainly at meetings, writing PowerPoint and Word documents, attending conf-calls and… meetings, meetings, meetings… actually doing whatever was needed for managing a large team. As far as I can remember, I enjoyed it.

Now, working in a bootstrap mode, I got back to write code. PowerPoint was replaced by Eclipse and Visual Studio. I really forgot how fun it is.
Being a developer is quite cool.
I was afraid that I’m rusty and not up to date with all new technologies but it seems that my experience pays off.
At the beginning it looks like software development became simple: google->copy->paste->refactor->compile->deploy->eat pizza (actually not sure about the last part). However, still, for development of high scale programs, software engineering skills and unavoidable.

To make it more interesting, I’m developing using several technologies
Device- Google Android OS (Apps are written in Java and run on a custom VM which runs on top of a Linux kernel)
Web Service - .Net – (to be replaced with a ‘cloud technology’)
Web client – Flex (to achieve rich client experience)

I should dedicated a post for the android SDK + Emulator (Google did a good job), but in the meantime I found myself awake at very late hours debugging my code.
Did I already say that coding is fun :-)

P.S. I found this picture lately. Given the current economic situation, it's not so funny.

Join the Club

The power of children is amazing. They have a built-in convincing power. If they want something they will get it.
The fact that children do not have credit card does not prevent them from spending money. This is why they have parents…
Club Penguin is an online game for children, virtual penguins in a virtual world. You can earn some coins by playing some games and spend it by buying stuff for yourself. You can chat with other penguins and do harmless regular social network things. The registration is free and gives you a taste of what could be the done.
But, and there is a big but, you need to be a member for being able to get the fun stuff. The membership costs ‘only’ $5.95 per month.
Now, do you think that a child that his/her friends are members will not convince his/her parents to pay for it? If your answer was ‘no’ you better think again.
I don’t know the exact numbers but I believe that Disney (who bought it 2 years ago for $350M) is having many paying users. It seems Club Penguin found the formula.
I’m relatively new to the club. My daughter convinced me a week ago to pay for membership. So they managed to caught her but will she insist on paying for the second month or will she get bored of it? I know the answer for that – after one month you can be promoted to a spy (never mind what it means) so the second month is guaranteed. What about the month after?

The Good/Evil Empire (take your pick)

When Google released Google Chrome I decided to use it. Dont know why but I liked it. Not only that I use it I also use the dev release. Is it better than IE, Firefox or any other browser out there? Don’t know, but it works well for me. I don’t intend to give a review of Chrome but to point out an interesting observation - Chrome has a feature that shows the 9 most used sites when you open a new tab. I don’t know how its algorithm works but while looking the other day on my top 9 sites, I found the following sites:
1. Google search (of course)
2. Google Reader
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Blogger
5. Facebook (how did it mange to slip in…)
6. Google Groups
7. Google Analytics
8. Google Docs
9. Google Trends

What does it mean?
I’m either a Google addict or Google push their sites to the list. I can believe both… I use at least 5 more Google services/sites which are not on the list.
Gmail was not on the list maybe because I never close it and I have it in my tray as well.

No doubt about it, Google dominates. Is it a good or evil empire? Up to you to decide.

P.S. In the spirit of these days, must be said that empire or not, GOOG got bitten badly this year

Happy New Year – Shana Tova

The year ends and another one begins…

In the last years it was a kind of tradition that I give the holidays’ speech to my team, summarizing our achievements and setting the bar for the next year to come. From year to year the team got bigger, same as the achievements and dreams for the next year. It was a good opportunity to stop the ongoing madness and to appreciate what we have. And each year I felt lucky for being able to do so.
This year I decided to keep the tradition with one change – this time you are the audience of my ‘speech’.

Keeping it short (no one likes to read long posts…), in the last year I made a huge change in my career which dramatically impacts my life – I’ve decided to follow my dreams and be an entrepreneur. It was not a one day decision but a process, in which together with the support of my wife I took the jump into a new world. For me it’s definitely only the beginning of a journey. My life really changed and one of the best things that happened is that without noticing I managed to spend much more time with the kids and enjoy most of it (after all, 3 kids can be annoying :-)).

What do I wish for next year?
In one sentence - Keep fulfilling my dreams, while focusing on the big stones and avoid distraction by the small ones.

So, have a great new year, spend your time wisely, be with your beloved, explore, dare, rest, enjoy and follow your heart.

And do not forget -“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present”

Eureka!

About 6 months ago when I’ve decided to change the nature of my career and be part of building something new, I did not imagine that my exploration would end by taking my wish to the extreme.

After great couple of months of exploration I’ve found a great partner for the journey – together with Benzi Ronen we co-founded something special.  Benzi and I know each other for many years while working at SAP and I fully trust him and his abilities to know that this partnership would be a huge success.

Indeed it’s only the beginning and we still have a very long way to go, however I'm optimisitc. As it says – ‘think positive and positive things would happen!’

If you are curious about what we are going to do, it’s something to do with the internet J stay tuned.