Calvin, Weaver

Quotable quote from Wesley Chun:

App Engine does not have a GUI for its SDK on Linux 

because Linux users type fast anyway.

Well, I use the CLI on both ...

Category: GAE

Tagged as: GAE

A lot have been said about the concept of pivoting a product concept because of all the surrounding buzz around Eric Ries' lean startup movement. 

Flickr

Flickr is a text-book example of successful pivoting.

Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of her engineers in her web-based game (massively multi player online game Game Neverending) showed her a cool functionality to share photos and save them into a web page.  Deciding that they should release it as a new project "Flickr", the application gained traction rapidly.  Apparently, the presumedly solved problem of photo sharing is still pretty much in demand. 

Early versions of the Flickr focused on a multiuser chat functionality called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities.

In fact, some key and popular features of Flickr (such as tagging, favoriting, group photo pools) were not even present in the first iteration.

It's a text-book story of how pivoting resulted in a hugely successful
photosharing website, with each pivot throwing out massive
amounts of work. even chopping years worth of sunk costs practically
overnight.

Category: Product Management

Messaging (method calls)

In Objective C,

[object message]

is equivalent to

object.method()
object->method()

When calling the method with a parameter, i.e. messaging with arguments, we have:

[object message: param1 withParameter: param2]

which of course is equivalent to

object.method(param1, param2)
object->method(param1, param2)

Nested Messaging ...

Category: Objective C

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is a little off the mark when he talks about how Apple is trying to re-invent history. 

So let me just begin with a disclaimer that I am not a huge Apple Fan.  I own a Macbook, a Windows7 HP Machine and a Compaq running on Ubuntu Linux.  I have messed around with Fedora, Gentoo and Debian as well.  My working phone is an Android and I like messing around with my wife's iphone on occasion, experimenting with some Objective C apps that I build and play with on iPhone Simulator.  (And yea, as a language, Objective C sucks big time compared to Python.  Python's known for its clean syntax and ease of use as a programming language)

Who are you Building for?

All that misses the point.  What mobile companies designing and creating products for the consumer market need to concern themselves with are:

• the ease-of-use of their product; and
• the specific demographics of the market they would like to seduce.

It doesn't really matter that Apple did not invent Video calling.  What matters is how they design the experience, the simplicity and intuitiveness of the experience for their target demographics.

It doesn't ...

Category: iphone

Is google going bling bling? Or is it bing bing?  I actually do like it. What do you think?

Category: google

So, it looks like our CTO isn't too happy with the complicated Buildbot set up, so taking matters into his own hand, he's created Odeon Tester Bender - a simple, no-frills Continuous Integration django application!

By using pretty much standard python modules in a python file named "testerbender.py":

import os
import logging
import atexit
import subprocess
import sys
from pprint import pprint
import csv
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

And a bunch of simple plain-text log files, data files and configuration "conf" file associated with our git update hook, he's designed a simple, no-frills continuous integration solution for our many projects!

We are going to open source this soon so stay tuned for our next update!

Let us know what you think about this clean, simple solution in comparison with the full-works buildbot!

Category: Continuous Integration

As coders, we are familiar with how function calls work in Python or C.  Whenever we call a function, the function gets a private namespace where its local variables are created.

Return

The return statement is where all the local variables are destroyed and the resulting value is given back ...

Category: Python

Buildbot (http://buildbot.net) is a software written in Python that automates the compile and test cycles for any kind of software projects.  It is configurable in a way that every change made on a source code repository generates some builds and launches some tests, and then provides feedback to the software developers.

Buildbot is used in many established open source software projects, including Python itself.  Jumping over to http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot ...

Category: Continuous Integration

Scrum and Agile Software Implementation is a relatively new methodology in the professional software design service industry.  Like many outsourced professional projects - whether in the field of construction or architecture - the way a vendor and a client arrive at an agreement on the billing method is the subject of intense debates and endless negotiations.

A Long, Painful - sometimes fun - Journey

As a custom software house, we have gone through tonnes of small, fixed budget projects and some time-based medium size projects before finally arriving at the point where we are now focused purely on large scale time-based professional services.  This ...

Category: Communication

Jack of All. Master of One.

Here's a controversial (almost blasphemous) opinion: Software Developers should not (and must not) work only on Software Functionality. 

And being a small and closely knitted team of techies here in Odeon, that's how we operate - and should continue to operate. Software Developers need to work on design (yes, photoshop), talk about and discuss business objectives, be accountable for and interact directly with end users of our software. 

Category: talents