March 28
2010
A business is an artifact. Something one creates. Not unlike a program or a system.
It took me a long time to realize this. For years I cared about the product I was working on at the time and hoped that, in spite of my lack of business thinking, it would somehow turn out to be successful and allow me to run a business around it. It doesn't work that way. When you create a business, the business itself is your creation --that is what you think about, what you care about, what you want to see grow. That is what you develop, test, tweak, and document. The particular product you develop is certainly not the end in itself, --it's just a means to an end.
That's a hard notion for a computer scientist to accept and embrace.
March 13
2010
I started this week with lots of goals, mostly having to do with communicating more closely with my beta users, and looking for others interested in giving logworm a try. It ended up being a week of tons of work, but regretfully not most of it directed towards logworm but to my consulting job. It's disappointing in a way, but on the other hand a company needs a cash flow, and having this consulting job ultimately allows me to extend the time I have to dedicate to logworm --and that's a great thing!
What were the highlights of the week?
- I did manage to spend enough time with my beta users, making sure that they have all they need to test (and hopefully enjoy!) logworm. This has been so far the best way to spend my time: not only do I keep these initial "customers" happy, which is certainly necessary, but most importantly I get good feedback from them and that allows me to work on features that really matter --not just features or solutions that I guess they'll care about, but features that I now know for certain that they'll care about. Plus, having someone say "thank you" because you help them solve some of their problems is a big boost in terms of self-esteem, and a good confirmation that you're on to something --I find it gives me a lot of energies to keep going. Having users is the best thing that can happen to you. For next week I plan to slow down my rate of development and spend as much time as possible talking with these beta testers, gauging their needs, and solving their problems.
- I attended the NoSQL Live conference in Boston, about which I'll write in more detail later. It was a great experience, not necessarily because of the talks and presentations themselves, but mostly because of the interesting people I got to meet. Among them was Adam Wiggins, co-founder of Heroku, with whom I could discuss architectural details for logworm and other potential improvements to their platform, including their upcoming marketplace for add-ons.
- Fortunately I had time to work on some needed logworm improvements. Most importantly, the gems for the client have been cleaned up, unified, tested, and uploaded to Rubygems.org; this means that the installation is now really a breeze: just
sudo gem install logworm_client, or simply add the gem to the .gems file. Also, I have vastly improved the Documentation, with much cleaner instructions on how to install the gems and what to do once you have data --the first logworm tutorial is slowly taking shape. Finally, and from feedback from one of my beta testers, I realized that people are concerned about potential delays to their applications while the client is talking to the server to store the logging information. To mitigate the apprehension, I've added a note in the FAQ, and modified the code so that it now reports the amount of time it takes talking to the server. In my experience, a logging call adds an average of 40ms to the processing of a request.
The plans for next week are similar: to continue this (at times slow) process of customer-driven development. This means not only responding to customers' requests, but also focusing as much as possible on acquiring new testers. Being able to putting myself in the shoes of the person who hears about
logworm for the first time and has to decide whether to devote it more than 3 seconds of their attention, allows me to make better decisions when I package the gems, write the documentation, work on the FAQ, design the welcome page, etc.
As they say, one step at a time... and I'm certainly looking forward to the next ones!
- Agustin
