you want to start something?

I’m finding Cocoa very hard. A few months ago, Aidan spent some time to coach me through the basics and while that went on I managed to get a lot of ‘relatively’ advanced things done. Going back to the code I wrote, even with the benefit of several weeks of writing out the examples in the book I bought and I’m lost. So it’s very much back to the drawing board.

this highlights some things to me.

1. Programming is hard. There’s no escaping it. It’s not something that everyone will pick up.
2. Programming requires focus. You need to pay attention to it. Otherwise you won’t learn.
3. Programming takes time. You’re not going to learn overnight. You need to look at it daily.

Tags: Code by mj
2 Comments »

Due to my own experience, I have no assumptions that a person in business may be a man or a woman but I find myself wishing for a third, gender-neutral noun for use in English. I know we have ‘it’ but it’s less neutral and more potentially derogatory.

IrishFlirtySomething writes:

“So I have been desperately pitching for new business to lots of dusty old men who say things like;
“aren’t you a ‘great girl’, running your own business – do you work all on your own?”
Which roughly translates as;
“Is there anyone with a Penis involved or is it just you and your Vagina?”

When I started running my own business, I experienced similar sentiment. I ‘looked’ young. Having been burned before by competitors who went out of business, they wanted to know would me and my business still be around in a year. They wanted to know would I still be around when they needed me or was I planning to swan off on holiday – or would I have any backup?

I don’t necessarily believe that they were being ageist in my case just as I don’t believe the antagonists were being sexist necessarily in her case. I took a load of shithere and here last year because I think that equality starts with not patronising people or giving one sector of the community better treatment than others.

In her case, I don’t think she didn’t get the contract because of her cleavage.

P.S. Flame on!

Tags: Commentary, Made me laugh by mj
No Comments »

A thoughtful piece from 37Signals on the necessity to monetise Twitter

“That doesn’t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other people’s money to do it with and a few years of practice.”

“If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you can’t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.”

It’s true. Twitter’s scaling issues are a bugbear in their sides because as their userbase is growing, the Potential Value (in terms of Attention) of the company grows but the Actual Value (in terms of revenue) stays stagnant. And they have a huge amount of Virtual Debt in the shape of investors who will want a return. So, yes, the service itself is cool but is it sustainable?

It seems to me they have three options:

1. Someone buys them for a gazillion dollars. This is what happened to Jaiku. Google bought them and then kinda ignored them. I guess it was a defensive buy? It then becomes someone else’s problem at how to make money out of it? I must say I don’t mind the way Twitterific handles it – advertising sponsored play is good enough. This is the model that the investors will likely want.
2. They find out a way to make money. What about building in the feature that Twitter-ites (Twitterlanders? Tweeters?) could make their own adverts? Anyone can tweet but Tweetvertising allows graphics? Maybe even audio or video? Maybe even some opt-in tracking (as if I’m being forced to watch adverts, at least make them interesting to me!). Or maybe offer Tweets separate to SMS to mobile phone companies? Make it unlimited for people who have signed onto Tweet plans but limit those of us who slip in under the radar with data. That’s certainly going to reduce some of the ‘noise’. I am guessing here that they already get a percentage of every SMS sent them? Unless this is truly revolutionary, it’s probably not going to please the investors.
3. They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

End of the day, it’s not my problem but I wonder what happens when they spent the last cent of the VC money they have received. Does the world go dark?

Tags: Commentary, Social by mj
No Comments »

The title for this blog post derives from the autre-title for “The Hobbit” which was “There and Back Again”. It details an arduous journey, full of frustration and friction, in order to have an adventure and then return home.

As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

1. Not this. It’s not even that I dislike corporate wage slave culture. I actually have no issues with it. I loved my time in Nortel and only moved on because timing, opportunity and encouragement were right. This is just mind-numbing. And typical, of course, of worst-class pandering to executives while stripping the workers of their pay rises. Not good enough for me.
2. I’m also not sure about whether I want to get back into IT work. It’s something (I think) I’m good at, having done it for over a decade now and there are new areas of business I’d like to move into, certainly, but the allure of crawling around chasing cables in a dusty footwell under a desk just doesn’t have the same appeal.
3. There are some things I’m totally enamoured with. Ubiquitous wireless. Co-Working. Bedouin working. The ‘Presence’ aspect of social software. The tricky thing is how to get all of that to pay a mortgage and feed a dog. Yes, I have a plan. I just need the timing to be right (after all I’ve got a full dance card until around September).

At the moment, with someone leaving $BIG_COMPANY every week, it doesn’t surprise me that I feel this way (and that I’m obviously not alone). I do wonder what sort of job you have to be in to get the freedom to attend talks and trips like Paddy’s Valley. I asked to attend a 1 day Open Source event in Belfast and was told it would be annual leave – some companies have such vision!

The answer is therefore to figure out what I really want to do, get paid for doing it, and wander off into the sunset.

It’s the question that drives us.

Tags: Bedouin, CoWorking, Do Something Now, Social, Startup by mj
4 Comments »

Reddit dredged up this gem which makes me wonder how close (or how far) business should be to politics.

Certainly makes their feelings clear. That will remain for a long time. If they use a colour-preserving detergent.

Tags: Made me laugh by mj
No Comments »