Jason Fried Web 2.0 Keynote – Be a Software Curator

How many of you are in software? You’re lucky. All you have to do is type. You don’t have to worry about physics. What you work on is easy to change. It’s not like you’re building a house. You can build software anywhere, in your house, in a plane, inside outside. Doesn’t matter you can build software. You’re lucky you can do all these things.

Watch Jason Fried @ Web 2.0 Expo. 20mns on why you should take care of your software product as a curator does for his museum : keep things out.

Check out report by Kris Jordan Jason Fried Web 2.0 Keynote – Be a Software Curator | Kris Jordan.

David Heinemeier Hansson @ Startup School 08

Big up to the great OMNISIO service for offering amazing video for Startup 08 conferences. Great web app, no question why Google bought this startup.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner at the 37Signals start-up extraordinaire.

In this presentation (A Secret to making money online) David goes through the business model and beyond that, all the basic principles that have guided 37Signals to become beyond the very successul company, a genuine example for the whole industry.

This is amazing stuff. Do yourself a favor and spend these 35 minutes with DHH, this is priceless in particular if you’re in the startup business.

Bitter SOA

Service Oriented Architecture is the new mantra to ease integration between heterogeneous systems in the enterprise.

Lately, I have been having questions about this approach and this post comes out from different experiences. One being reading Vincent thoughts on the topic on TechItEasy.

The other being this excellent and lively presentation by Jim Webb and Martin “architecture guru” Fowler : SOA without ESB. The last was the presentation from Didier Girard during the excellent Université du SI conference in Paris back in early july. The bottom line of both presentations being : the web works. The Web is resources that are easily accessible.

Using Web Services for different systems integration within the Enterprise should be easy. We should have resources easily searchable and accessible. Hence these questions about how relevant Service Oriented Architecture stands as it is implemented today.

37Signals : Alternative Software Business

Code will tear us apart

There is this Alternative rock scene that blossomed back in the late 70s/early 80s on the ashes of the punk music. This encompassed bands like XTC, Wire, The Cure or Joy Division in the UK and Husker Dü or R.E.M in the US.

They basically had the energy and the DIY approach of the punk bands but as opposed to the latter they have a much more realistic view of the business, were not so self destructive (except maybe Joy Division Ian Curtis).

They had a proper plan : offering an alternative to mainstream (hence the name) pop music, driven by their vision of what it should be : quality pop song with an attitude, with an independent (hence Indie in the UK) artistic approach, ignoring business driven advices from major record companies marketing executives.

Viewing this Jason Fried (co-founder of web2.0 start-up extraordinaire 37Signals) video, I thought of the many similarities of their business approach in the software industry with that very musical vogue. Thinking about it, this analogy also gives some hints on 37Signals success …

Scrum, Agile, XP and the real life

I mentionned it earlier : I have joined the techiteasy.org mob. This is a bunch of passionated and motivated young professionnals blogging collaboratively on the IT world, the internet culture and entrepreneurship.

Scrum and XP from the trenches

I have just posted my first contribution : this is about the Henrik Kniberg e-book : Scrum and XP from the Trenches. I was kinda procrastinating about this book for a while but then Fred strongly recommended me the read.

I had the opportunity of managing a team of server side developers in the mobile industry and this post is about applying these agile methodologies during that time.