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Unfuddle Business Strategy: Unfuddle was the direct result of solving one’s own problems

I’m a big fan of Unfuddle. They really nailed the combination of repository hosting and project management/issue tracking. They’re also hosted on Amazon and allow you to back up everything there to your own S3 account.

Here is a quote from Joshua Frappier, one of the two Unfuddle founders:

Like many in our industry, we turned to Basecamp as a holy grail for solving our team’s communication needs — and like most developers, we quickly learned that it was simply not designed with the needs of a software development team in mind.

I wish I could say that starting Unfuddle was the result of a revolutionary idea. But as with most products that make an impact, Unfuddle was the direct result of solving one’s own problems.

With a firm foundation in managing our small team’s needs, my partner David Croswell and I immediately began work on what would be the core of Unfuddle. We were not trying to invent something revolutionary. We were not trying to introduce some new paradigm to the software industry. We just wanted something that was simple and met our most basic needs – needs that no one else seemed to want to meet. Rock solid repository hosting, bug and issue tracking at a price that was sensitive to small development shops.

David and I have been committed from the very beginning to growing Unfuddle into a company that was sustainable. In this way, we have made many decisions that seem strange to some people. We have said no to every opportunity to accept investment. We have said no to adding features that would grow us beyond our ability to provide outstanding support to our customers. We have said no to growing our team beyond essentially a developer and a designer. We have strived to only spend our time on those features our customers have overwhelmingly requested.

As a result, after almost three years, David and I now have a company and product that we and our customers love. Every day we have the opportunity to serve and interact with tens of thousands of our peers as customers — all the while providing well for ourselves and our families.

Source: http://blog.adsdevshop.com/2009/02/06/unfuddle-their-story/

Jonathan Ive: Apple Designer: Focus Group Hater

This is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Jonathan Ive, the Apple designer responsible for most of Apple’s big products over the last decade, including the iPhone.

“For a large mulit-billion dollar company we don’t actually make many different products,” he explained. “We’re so focused, we’re very clear about our goals.”

He said that Steve Jobs had always made it very clear that this focus on products was the only reason for Apple to exist – and contrasted the culture with that of other companies who talk about having similar aims: “If you have to spend time institutionalising that, talking about it, you end up chasing your tail.”

So how did the company decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/listening_to_mr_iphone.html

Dear FaceBook Users…

I have been getting around 20+ emails  a day telling me that various apps aren’t working, or that things aren’t displaying correctly on profiles. I have tried to answer each email individually, and have tried to help those that I can. It seems that the re-design that launched last week also changed the way much of the underlying API works, and as a result many many apps are broken.  Now unfortunately, these aren’t apps that I own, even though I wrote some, fixed some, and am listed as the developer on some. I’ve contacted the various owners of the applications, and for the most part have heard nothing but crickets. I’ve even offered to fix some of them for free, and still no response. So for the mean time, until I get the green light to go in and muck about with the code, we both are somewhat stuck. For those of you that are having problems getting stuff to embed on your profile you need to check the app permissions. You can do so by following these steps:

1) Click on the Applications button (on the bottom left) and then click on ‘Edit’

2) This will take you to the edit page.

3) Click ‘Edit’ to the right of the application.

4) This will open up a new little window, Click ‘Profile’, and make sure it has permissions (by clicking ‘Add’) .

I will continue to answer what emails I can and if I get the chance to post updated versions I will let everyone know.

Thanks for your patience.

Mixergy Funding Forum: The Smart Way to Get Your Startup Funded

Mixergy Funding Forum: The Smart Way to Get Your Startup Funded

I attended the Mixergy Funding Forum last night to hear a bunch of discussions about getting your startup funded. The presenters included:

• William Quigley – Managing Director, Clearstone Venture Partners
• Daniel Gould – Co-Founder Newroo. Currently VP, Technology at Fox Interactive.
• Mark Suster – Parter, GRP Partners

All in all, I thought it was a very strong event. All the presenters were quite good. I appreciated Mark Suster, who came across as quite bright and funny. He made the point that if he invests 5 million in your company, and you turn around and sell it for 20 million dollars–your company is a failure. VCs want BIG gains, not a small multiple of their original investment.
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Traveling back to the 90s…

Back in the 90s I used to write some articles for WebReference.com  focusing on building web based applications. Strangely enough they all seem to have disappeared except for the first article I ever wrote for them, Perl 101. Not sure how the article holds up, but I remember being very excited about it back when I wrote it. I think I was still in College and commuting to NY to work, and this was the first thing I ever wrote and sold.  I think I got paid $400 for it, but I could be remembering wrong. Hopefully I can find the rest of them–I actually had some decent articles on web strategies that I think would hold up fairly well.

Large fire at Universal Studios lot

It isn’t California if you don’t wake up to a fire, flood, or quake…and today it’s a fire. I heard there are about 300+ firefighters right now battling a large blaze on the universal studio back lot. We are probably 4 miles from the lot, so you can really see the smoke. No ashes yet, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time until the wind changes direction.

Multi Poster cURL Library – Parallel HTTP Requests in PHP with cURL

I recently completed a project that required moving small amounts of data to different servers. Easy enough. The only complication was that it needed to make around 500 separate requests a minute (and growing), to different servers, with different data. Unfortunately cURL typically makes it requests in a synchronous fashion–the next event doesn’t fire until the previous one has completed. When you’re running 500 a minute, every minute, and you have to wait for the previous event to finish, you immediately start building a stockpile of requests–which is bad. Very bad. Every minute the queue grows bigger, and the performance becomes worse. However, cURL has a built in group of functions called curl_multi which allows you to send all of your requests simulatenously. It reduced the processing time so dramatically, that my software can now easily send the 500 requests in under 10 seconds. To that end, I ended up rewriting a function I found over at phpied.com to handle a variety of different scenarios involving post and get parameters. Most of the documentation you need can be found in the example.php file where I included a bunch of different case scenarios.

You can download all the necessary info here: Multi Poster cURL Library.

Status Update Class

I’ve recently been doing some work on updating content (status messages) on the various social networks and social service sites. I’ve taken this functionality and encapsulated it into some classes which will allow you to simulatenously (or individually) update the following sites:

• twitter.com
• pownce.com
• jaiku.com
• tumblr.com

It is nothing fancy as this point, but hopefully in future versions I will clean up the code a bit and add some other sites to the list. In the meantime though, if you’ve been looking for a way to make your web application post to twitter, pownce, tumblr, or jaiku, this might be a quick and easy way to get going. NOTE: Your server needs CURL for these to work

Download: Status Update Class Version .9

Google Enterprise Cloud Search Program

I am once again up late at night writing a whole bunch of code to handle searching some poorly organized database tables (I didn’t create them), and I know that no matter what I do  it is not going to be as modular or as functional as I would like. Some times you can only work with what’s given to you. It makes me wish that Google would release an enterprise cloud search program. I want to have Google create an index on content I specify, that I can then query thru an api and have datasets returned to me. I would only have to get familiar with the API once, and then I could just modify some code and generate a few sitemaps (which I do anyway), and the whole search piece is taken care of. And the best part, is that no matter what I write code wise I know Google’s search will be better. I would LOVE to pay for this. As I move more and more stuff into the cloud, I would love to never have to worry about writing a piece of search functionality again.