Becoming a Software Engineer

I was recently asked by a former disertation tutor to do a talk at my old university on being a software engineer at an open day for prospective university students. I was happy to oblige, and I've put up the slides on slideshare.net. However, in true Downey form there's not much in terms in written text, but there's more pictures and hopefully, engagement with the audience by the presenter.

This led to some interesting debates on my return to work, with some questioning the need to do a computer science degree at all. It seems there are plenty of people with other technical degrees that move into the software field, and seem to do rather well for themselves.

My take is that my degree was very vocational, and the things I learn't at university I apply directly to my job today. Also that I picked up a lot of theory and hopefully have a more rounded and thorough understanding of the technical problems we face. Hopefully. I have to say though that probably for each useful module I had, I had one useless module. Go figure, I could have tried harder at university, I could have learn't more, but I came out with a good degree and have a good job so no massive loss.

On reflection, a lot of the books I bought at uni are either sitting on my shelf largely unread or have been sold on eBay. But now adays I tend to read a lot of technical and 'business' books, so what would I recomend to prospective students?

'Technical books'

Agile web development with Rails - an excellent introduction to web programming in a cool language, though it leaves testing a little late.


'Business books'

Mavericks at work - a look at innovative solutions to common business problems.
Cluetrain Manifesto - how the web has changed business and made us communicate again.
Getting Real - 37 Signals answer to bloatware.

'Methodology books'

Practices of an agile developer - excellent practices to follow for an agile developer
Lean Software Development - lean and trim software development.

There's probably a whole bunch more I can't think/remember of and a bunch I'd like to read.

What would you recomend?

Stuffed or information overload

I'm stuffed, I feel like I've had three Christmas dinners in a row, I can't eat any more. No more fees for me please.

I seriously need a cull of the feeds in my reader, I can't keep up with everything that people are writing. I tend to have a habit of adding feeds left right and center when ever I read a good post/article. I like and want to be able to read good bloggers.

What to do?!?

Lifestreaming or the Robbie Clutton problem

With horror (ok delight really), I read about the "Robbie Clutton" problem on Simon's blog. It's interesting how a disgruntled post seems to get more traction, but hey ho.

Check out that post, then come back.

Ok, finished?

Good.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how to make lifestreaming easier for everyone. At the moment, I've seen blogs about doing that using Yahoo! Pipes, which is cool, but let's make it easier.

Any volunteers to help build a life stream site welcome =)

How much is it worth?

I've always liked my gadgets and my entertainment, such as music and movies. Recently, these industries have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing world around them. I've thought about this somewhat in the past (see: here and here) , but now my thoughts turn to: what would I be willing to pay for what kind of service?

Now, for example, Heroes, the awesome TV show is currently running the second series in the US, but the first season is only just finishing up in the UK. Luckily it's on BBC, so my TV license covers me to watch that, but really, why should I miss out on a digital product which is available in a different country, but now in my own country?

Let's get this straight, a show show/series/season is a product. It's something that you pay for, either through TV license, subscription or pay per view. It's not a traditional product, but it's something a lot of people pay for, hence the high cost for production companies to try to out do each other.

I might have lost out on this, take Lost for example. In the UK, it's on Sky first, and I'll be dammed if I'm paying £40p/m for something I don't need. I'll also be dammed if I'm going to pay £40 for the first half or even the whole season when it comes out on DVD. I might, however, be interested to pay a nominal amount to watch the stream of an episode. Hell, I might pay even more if I can download it and watch it where-ever. Why not take a leaf out of Radiohead's book and let me download the whole lot, week by week, and when available, send me a copy of the DVD release.

Yeah, I'd pay for that. I don't want to subscribe, I want to pay per view, and if that's through a consumer product like BT Vision, or Freeview then so be it. But, how about just using the web? And please, none of this DRM crap, I'd like to be able to watch the damm video on my Linux laptop while I'm traveling.

Word to the wise: I'm not going to pay for Sky, Cable or any subscription TV service. I'm not likely to buy a DVD of a TV series if I've seen it already, though I might take a chance if I've not seen it and it's reasonably priced. I am likely to pay for an on-demand/download service for high quality, HD content if I don't have to wait 9 months after it's shown on US television.

Time to get your act together, that includes you BBC!

The customer is always right, and now they've only got themselves to blame

Are you fed up of buying the same old crap from the same old places (for anyone who's been to my flat, please ignore the fact it looks like an Ikea showroom, just for now)? It seems that more power is being given to the people, more power, more choice, more voice!

Though I was taken my Barry Schwartz view on this (an excellent presentation I'm sure you'll agree), it seems now that the small guy is coming through, and they are giving people what they want. Something different.

Threadless.com is a great example here. A community driven clothes selling retail web site. Users can upload their designs and other users can vote for those. Winning* designs are printed by threadless for a limited run. Once those t-shirts sell, users can request another print run though at threadless's discretion. What an awesome idea.

Flicking through Saturday's Guardian, I come across another innovative, if similar idea. Essentially the same, except for household objects. People can upload designs of products and others can suggest changes and make comments. Once that product has a certain amount of votes (currently 1000), the business agrees to take on the design (unless it conflicts with copyright, health and safety laws etc) and create a batch to sell to retail channels. Now, this guy has just set up a channel agreement with Muji, a UK high street distributor. Instead of the threadless payback (kudos, plus some one off cash and gift vouchers - plus potentially more for re-prints and winning further competitions), the designer is given royalties on profits. How awesome is that. Both interesting models.

So now, not only can you buy something that's different, on a limited run, you can now potentially get your own ideas made for yourself and into the homes of others.

These sites let you contribute, but personalisation sites are doing well too, least we forget moo.com =)

*winning defined by threadless.com, not exactly sure what that is as I've not entered a competition

Experiencing Customer Experience

I may be wrong here, but the only time I really know I'm experiencing customer experience is when something goes wrong. That something going wrong could be any part of the buying, or 'in life' experience. I wanted to tell a few stories of when something went wrong with me and my reactions to those experiences.

easyjet

I bought tickets to Barcelona for Tech Ed from Easyjet, but made the mistake of booking the wrong week. I don't know why, my mind was elsewhere or something. Anyhoo, I noted that to change a flight there's a charge applied, fair enough I though. When I booked however, I was shown prices which I believed were the new price flights before my flight prices had been deducted. Only after I'd gone through the whole process had I realised that I'd been charged that extra. To me it had looked like I'd paid twice. I contacted Easyjet and over several increasingly frustrating exchanges I had not got any compensation. I had believed I had been charged twice, they didn't even listen to my point of view, and instead pointed me to their T&Cs. Bad customer experience.

threadless.com

I'd made the stupid mistake of getting carried away by a threadless.com sale. All t-shirts for $10. At the time I was just about to move home, but instead of directing them somewhere sensible, like my parents, I got them delivered to my home that I was currently occupying. The package went missing in the post. When I contacted threadless they were suprisingly helpful. They asked me to wait two weeks just in case the package showed up. When they didn't, they offered a full refund! I took credit, as I wanted to order some more t-shirts and they gave me an additional $5 for my troubles! Even though I'd pretty much said I was most likely my fault! Good customer experience.

land of leather

When I'd moved into my new home, I was in need of a sofa/couch. As it happened I'd seen an ad for a sale in the land of leather. I went into the store and after a while, seen a cracking sofa. Paid for it and had it delivered the next week. Only it wouldn't fit through the door. Somehow this was my fault. I'd thought the sofa would come apart, surely this is a common problem, I mean I only life in a standard size house. That was the first problem, the second was that the delivery drivers expected to get paid. This pissed me off royally, why should I pay for a product I'd not received? They wouldn't even give a refund. Bad customer experience.

Round up

It's not all about the money, it's about the dialog. Land of leather and Easyjet refused to enter a dialog with me, which meant I didn't get what I wanted and damaged their brand in my eyes. Treadless.com entered a dialog with me and exceeded expections.

Buying, Building and Open Sourcing

Stumbled across this great little post on Try Before You Buy Marketing, thanks to Doc Searls Thankslinking. It got me thinking about companies selling products they don't use themselves, there's got to me loads out there. Equally, there must be loads of companies that have products which are used within the company network that could be sold or open sourced, as well as companies who spend fortunes on buying products that could be obtained from the open source community.

Madness.

Software engineers need love too.

It's amazing how a new environment, a ton of pressure and a bunch of uncertainty can make people react. I found out earlier this week how software engineers react. At a three day off site, a large group of people, both developers and 'suits', were told to leave their job titles at the door. Unfortunately for me and the team I was working with, it felt as if we'd left our software engineering principles at the door too.

Having essentially 48 hours to build a product, mostly from scratch, or at least using new products/APIs and services to plug something together seemed to suggest that we threw our best practices out of the window. Now the working environment wasn't set up exactly how we would have liked it, but we could have done something about that. Without even the basic necessity of source control, it felt as if the team were fire fighting from an early stage with USB drives being swapped around at crucial times, along with cries of "hey, can you add this method to the code?" when it could have been done easily and checked in.

I certainly felt like I was developing with one hand without using test driven development, source control, continuous integration et al. If three days being thrown into the deep end has taught me anything, its to be prepared.

I once heard the phrase, "a bad tradesman blames his tools", but conversely, does that mean that a tradesman is only as good as the tools he uses? Perhaps I've grown so used to the tools that I use that I've come to depend on them, and while that encourages best behaviour, does that make me inflexible?

Introducing the next killer app: The API

The next killer app should free you, not tie you up. Learn to let go of the simple portal which either doesn't know or doesn't care about giving you your data. Throw away your one-size-fits-all applications. Discard your thick client can-only-use-on-one-computer solutions, abandon your installed behind the corporate firewall vendor stacks. Strive for simple and open protocols, embrace hosted in the cloud services, love the API and the data it allows you to get too. Pick the applications that suit your needs, adopt services that give you access to your data. It's your data, it doesn't belong to them. You are the user, customer and developer. Choose integration and syndication. Choose the web. Choose life.

I'm going to blog about you

First prize goes to Alan Spillane, first person to blog about meeting me (and Nigel). I have a few people asking me if I was that guy in that video, but this is a step further.

While talking about Tech Ed, Alan mentions meeting us and has a picture to prove it. Brilliant, that certainly made my day. Check it out here.

Other peoples blogs

Right, annoyed enough now (been reading uncov.com and feeling writing an agitated post). It really bugs me blogs have some mystical hook into a online book marking site that results in most, if not all blog posts having only links.

Please stop it, if I want to know what you're reading, I'll subscribe to your del.icio.us (or whatever) feed.

If you want to subscribe to mine, you can get it at del.icio.us/robert.clutton.

You won't find link only posts on my blog entry =p

Anonymity, Freedom of speech and privacy on the web

Is it everyones right to be anonymous online?

I was pointed to a discussion going on at getsatisfaction.com about Facebook users not being able to sign up with 'fake names'. Really, who is Facebook to judge such things? I have friends who sign up to most things with a fake name and email address specifically to not give away personal information. Who cares?

In my previous post I discussed the use of inner dialogs spilling out onto the web giving everyone a voice. Though the volume of randomness is extremely high (my RSS reader constantly tells me I've got more then a 1000 items to read, yikes!) everyone deserves a voice. We may choose to not listen, but that's another matter.

Like an employee kept behind a firewall during their 9-5, do they have a right to discuss their opinions openly on the web and do that in an anonymous way?

Others are framing what I think is the same scenario differently, JP talks about openness rather then anonymity while David Weinberger goes more into depth on the Facebook ad platform regarding privacy.

An interesting comeback, as I'm reading Cluetrain Manifesto at the moment (finally), and Chris Locke is talking about his struggles to get his voice heard while at IMB. Being locked down by the corporation, Chris resorted to anonymous mailing list/early blogs to get his views across.

Certainly, when I started using the web, I used psudeo names when I posted on message boards and even when I started blogging here. I'm not so anonymous anymore, but that's my choose and my decision to make, not any one application or business.

Social Networks and Inner Dialogs

"With Britain home to four million blogs, the inner monologue is in peril. But when everything is made public, something is lost" - Marina Hyde

Amazing! That comment and the rest of the article made me question why I even write blog posts in the first place. Yet, I'm still here, typing away. The part about the inner dialog makes me think about one of JDs daydreams from Scrubs (yes, I love that show). It all got me thinking, there certainly is a lot of information on the superhighway, and it's becoming more and more important how we filter that as more and more people have a voice and use it. I've certainly seen some complete gibberish on some of the social networks out there, along with the many blogs.

Does your inner dialog feel repressed in todays world? I certainly find myself talking/thinking to myself as much as any other time. Except now I think about how I can turn it into a blog post lol.

Convergence, Divergence and Social Web Apps

What's all this fuss about the iPhone huh? Do people really want convergence? Don't people like carrying around several different electronic devices on them to do everything they want? Wait. Scratch that.

Seriously though, has the world gone convergence mad? Is there any demand left for divergence? Well, I look at my hi-fi system and I see a perfect example. Now, I'm no expert, but since I had my first job stacking shelves at the local supermarket, I've bought hi-fi separates. I've bought good components and upgraded as I've gone along. I pay for what I want, and don't pay for what I don't. Want a kick ass amp? Hell yeah! Want a DAB digital radio? Not really.

When I look at social web apps like Facebook, I see massive convergence. Yes, developers are writing third party apps, but it feels like I get trapped in the Facebook mini-web. I like being able to choose what web apps I want to use and how to use them, and yes, I even pay for some of those (Flickr Pro rocks!). All of those apps are online and interact-able over the web and some even over SMS (e.g. Twitter and Dopplr).

This leads me onto another thought. None of the apps send me an email to tell me something has changed on their site and that I need to go to their site to see that. I can just get that straight through that email, or through other means like RSS (which means I can stick with my favourite RSS reader).

I mention this as I was sent this brilliant blog post at telepocalyse.net which reads like a web manifesto, and one I can sign up to.

In Facebook, I've got my 'friends' sorted and they can see any changes in state, application notifications and lots of other crap. I don't have to tell my friends about each application which is good, but means I get loads of crap I'm not interested in and find it hard to filter that out.

That was for the first point, I think I've touched on some of the others and you can easily see what the post is describing with the others. I can totally understand the point about OpenID though. Please, please, please, if you're reading this and are building a web app, for the love of god let me use OpenID.

Steven Fry, Techo Blogger

I grew up watching Steven Fry in Blackadder and always found him funny. When ever I'd read an article from him I'd always found myself chuckling. I had no idea that he wrote a gadget column in the Guardian until they printed an article about the iPhone on the front page on the Saturday edition. You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/10/iphone1?gusrc=rss&feed=media

This is probably the most convincing article I've read about the iPhone for the UK, worth a read.

Making Friends and Influencing Robots

Going to a conference to show off communication services often results in those we talk to thinking about the different notifications engines that sending SMSs could be used for. Cool, great, yeah... Now and then someone comes along with something a little different. Step up Mr Paul Foster. Paul has an interesting gadget at home. A robot. It reminds me of the robot in Rocky IV that sings happy birthday to Paulie. The subtle difference though is Paul's robot travels through his house and does stuff and isn't just in a classic (?) 80s film. Don't ask me what kind of stuff, I just don't know. What I do know though is that the robot has a web server and using CallFlow, Paul can use the pattern matching DTMF collections to POST requests to the web server that is Paul's robot, and that the robot can understand those requests and perform a task which Paul has programmed in. Read for yourself what Paul is up to.

Round of applause for the most creative idea I've heard of so far.

This triggered a distant memory (August is distant still right?), when JayFresh forwarded me a clip sent from Michael found about using a phone to control a video game. Check it out about 6 minutes in.

At the time this wasn't possible with the Web21C SDK, but Paul has shown that with CallFlow this is most definitely possible.

Happy coding.

Taking a REST at the library

I really like the fact more and more REST friendly web APIs are springing up in unlikely places. Embrace the web ... and go see if the local library has that book in stock ;)

data mining for good

There's been some press about data privacy, and these do revolve around large issues such as national ID cards, but data mining has it's uses. Consider this, I use last.fm to scrobble my music through my music player on my PC (also available for iPods when sync'd through iTunes).

From this data along with my location, I just got an email with gig listing of music I might like coming up in my location.

Awesome.

my blog stability

I've been told that my blog has been a little unstable over the last few weeks and after investigating the good people at GoDaddy.com told me how I'd mis-configured my named servers, whoops!

Hopefully anyone affected shouldn't have any more problems, but please let me know if you do.

Robbie

All Change: Lessons Learnt?

There is an interesting article in todays Metro (which is a rare thing in itself). A discussion with David Signton. He was talking with reference to the claims that the space fairing nations are preparing to go back to the moon and eventually onto Mars, but had disapointment in his voice. "I think they feel we haven't really hoisted on board the lessons we discovered from the Apollo missions about Earth". OK, he's talking more about environmentalism here, but the lesson could be said for so many other things.

I wonder where we make this mistake in our everyday/work lifes. When we pass things on, or move about in the work place, does the loss of continuity affect performance? Can this lead to the same discussion being had over and over or the same mistakes being made over and over?

Open Source: consumer vs creator (more thoughts)

I had some more thoughts on my earlier entry regarding those who make it their business to sell products that solve common business problems. There's plenty of examples from operatoring systems to specific industry solutions.

These do range from consumer (as in retail) to business and as such have different market stratgeies and such. I was wondering if it would depend what market you were in to how your open source strategy would be implemented.

If you solve a common problem, should you open source it, sell it or shelf it?