I am not a programmer - Latest Comments

Re: How 37Signals Thinks

Ralph Miller — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:01:33 -0000

I'm a big fan of 37signals, and their stance on developing native apps is spot on. More people should consider subscribing to this way of thinking -- "write less - do more." So many clients want to develop a web app using a native application, but when you look at the cost involved with multiple devices and updates, we always advise against it. Using Ruby on Rails, we can develop a single, branded web application, then use jquery mobile framework to make it available for multiple mobile devices. The best part is, it looks and feels just like a native app.

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

Howie — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:38:01 -0000

As any good engineer will tell you, there's no such thing as an all-purpose tool. Not all web applications are a good fit for rails. If it's a complex application that requires a lot of CRUD functionality, Rails (or Django) are great. But what if it's a small application that doesn't necessarily need a database backend? What if it's a real-time app that needs to be high-performance and handle a lot of simultaneous connections? I'm sure Rails is a great framework, though I've never used it myself, but to say that it is the solution to all problems and that anyone who suggests otherwise is an idiot is a tremendous oversimplification.

Re: Google Adwords is not the best use of your advertising budget

Google Adwords — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:37:37 -0000

So beautiful post guys..............................

Re: How 37Signals Thinks

Ruby on Rails — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:37:21 -0000

It is good to here about 37signals and the Cinco. Thanks for the post.

Re: How 37Signals Thinks

Kazantsev Ilia — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:45:44 -0000

Looking forward to cinco realise. Supouse it would be intersting product, but now it is very slow, sencha is much pretier.

Re: Data Mine Icon

jrallison — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:00:07 -0000

Love it!

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

Joshua Kehn — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:30:22 -0000

This is so funny I'm not even sure where to start. Let's just go with knocking down the points one by one:

1. Yeah, flash messages and pluralization are completely mind boggling.
2. My deployment process takes 25 seconds to rsync to a server. 1-2 minutes if I have a complex Java application and an ant build to follow.
3. Ever heard of PECL? C / C++ compiled extensions spank Ruby gems's all the way across the board and into the little kids pond.
4. I give you a utterly scientific Google Fight: http://www.googlefight.com/ind...
5. Sex appeal to sell a framework? Is there even a point to this?

Regards,

Josh

Re: Google Adwords is not the best use of your advertising budget

kennsaa — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:40:19 -0000

Can you give us a bit more of a break down on your 30$ Adword per conversion ? What strategies/metrics did you use for daily budget / monthly budget, and from advertising how many clicks/visits did you get and of that - how many % or (in #'s) were actual sign up members, or buyers?

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

Altareq — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:34:30 -0000

Rails is good, I suppose Rails 3 is also good, but Ruby Web Future is Padrino, it is way much better. Check it out. I can convince you that you are not totally right, rather not also wrong, we all learn day by day.

Re: What does a product manager do?

CEO — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:36:36 -0000

Good post. But there is more to product managers, for example Go-to-Market (which is post-development but starts at strategy), tactical (from dev to marketing and sales) and so on plus you should add a line back to strategy, as product management is a continuous cycle.

ceo
http://cenriqueortiz.com

Re: What does a product manager do?

Ki. — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:04:05 -0000

Recently I've been using Axure for wireframes / prototypes. It's very similar to Visio but built for PMs. So far, so good - it's the best thing I've used besides pen and paper and provides the flexibility to go from sketchy boxes to polished prototype. Has a few quirks and isn't updated often, but I like it.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Colin Nederkoorn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:39:54 -0000

I've been using a mixed-fidelity approach. http://bit.ly/dxH5Z4 <--- something I sent to a client last week.

I think mixed fidelity works well when you know some things for certain - in our case, how you log in / sign up.

I created a bunch of "sketchy" keynote stencils - http://bit.ly/dd3AMi available for free if you want them. I have to resist the temptation to over-design in keynote.

Balsamiq is a fantastic product and Michael Angeles from Konigi has been working with Peldi at Balsamiq to make it better. I haven't used it more than to test it but I'm impressed. Im curious to hear more about your experience with it.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Brad Dickason — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:10:38 -0000

Colin,

I've been debating moving to Keynote from Balsamiq but I'm worried about the 'polish' aspect. With Balsamiq, you get a sketchy, ugly wireframe which is great! People aren't concerned about the details. Do you ever have problems with the fact that Keynote delivers nice looking prototypes/wireframes? I'm almost wondering if this is a bad thing given that people are more prone to criticize design issues with the prototype items rather than the prototype itself.

P.s. I found your post off of HN in case that helps your analytics :)

Re: What does a product manager do?

Colin Nederkoorn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:18:14 -0000

Hi Vasco,

I agree! Waterfall is so broken. We use agile with 1 week iterations at ChallengePost.

The diagrams in the article are not meant to show dev process, but rather a product continuum from idea to execution or abstract to specific. You do have to do them in sequence but there is a feedback loop and your iterations can be as short as a week further down the chain.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Vasco — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:24:29 -0000

Waterfall as described by you is plain broken ;)

Re: What does a product manager do?

Colin Nederkoorn — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:38:19 -0000

Ki, glad you found the article useful. How do you do your wireframes and prototypes? I've switched almost exclusively to Keynote and am loving it so far.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Colin Nederkoorn — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:35:23 -0000

Alexander - look forward to seeing you at night owls. I'll probably go tomorrow. If you're there i'd be really curious to talk with you more.

However, I'm not surprised you've had that experience. I work in the field and the only person I'd trust is @jinen, an old friend and PM at twitter. I know there are others out there like Zach Klein and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, but they're a lot easier to identify and a lot harder to hire than PMs who haven't yet had a breakout success.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Ki. — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:01:53 -0000

As an Awesome Product Manager, I just wanted to say: I love what I do, and I love this post!

Having a PM (I mean, an Awesome PM) can save you even more precious design and development time if you let us test concepts and flesh out ideas so that those 'mistakes' can be weeded out even earlier. If closely integrated with the Design & Development teams, an APM can produce wireframes and prototypes to socialize new Product features and enhancements with stakeholders once the requirements are set.

I've found that including Development and Design in early Product concept work helps a LOT. Anyone who designs in a vacuum should be sucked up in one! It allows for priceless early input into initial concepts and ideas without wasting their time, and can increase the sense of product ownership (motivation) amongst the teams. Plus if Design and Dev know what's coming and have already discussed implementation methods, it helps all involved plan and manage their resources much earlier in the process.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Alexander Torrenegra — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:47:56 -0000

Thank you for the post Colin.

For over five years I've hired four product developers for three different startups I've co-founded. None of them has delivered satisfactory results. I am a perfectionist and that may be part of the issue. I've decided to stick to product development and, instead, hire others to take care of sales, business development, operations, etc. Also, doing product development is what I love the most. I am a geek. I am not good at interacting face-to-face with others. I look forward to see you at the next New York Night Owls, though :P

Having said that, I am looking forward to partner with a friend that has potential as product developer in a future startup. Hopefully this time it will work.

Re: What does a product manager do?

Campbell McKellar — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:13:45 -0000

Wow, Colin, you laid this out so clearly, I don't think I need to write a job description for a product manager now, I can just point them to your blog. Your insight on this subject is spot on with my experience to date. We launched 2 months ago. Pre-launch, you are all consumed by pushing to the launch and getting your product to market asap. I didn't realize once we launched how many other opportunities and responsibilities would come my way and I have been pulled in many directions, just as you outline here. Of course hindsight is 20-20, but I would suggest to other founders (technical and non-technical but especially sole founders) to start looking for this person early. It takes a while to find someone with the right fit, and as Colin says, once you launch, the number of hats you are wearing multiplies by 10 and right when you need someone most you have the least amount of time to find them. Great post.

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

gotomanners — Sat, 08 May 2010 00:38:28 -0000

I personally use Grails, as I'm more accustomed to Java.

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

Nathan Esquenazi — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:58:32 -0000

As part of the padrino core team, I can say that you are right that maintaining our framework requires a lot of time and effort. What helps us stay active is that all three of us do our own contract work / professional development in Padrino. I have several client projects in Padrino myself and Davide (italian core developer) has over 15 sites developed in Padrino. We have a vested interest in keeping Padrino rock-solid and its continued development. I suspect anybody not 'eating their own dog food' in the case of a framework will not last long keeping it actively maintained.

That being said, I am glad to hear tibbon that you are using Sinatra / Padrino for your development. And thankfully Padrino doesn't force you to sacrifice any speed as shown in our benchmarks here: http://www.padrinorb.com/blog/...

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

jrallison — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:39:39 -0000

Oh, definitely agree. There's a balance between not worrying about scaling issues at all and spending all your time optimizing and getting nothing done.

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

Colin Nederkoorn — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:57:37 -0000

Padrino looks cool http://www.padrinorb.com/ . Django admin with Sinatra simplicity. I'd imagine people on the core team at these smaller frameworks get fatigued supporting a small community. Building and maintaining these things require a lot of time and effort. I wonder How many niche frameworks will be actively supported in a year?

Re: Five reasons smart startups use Rails

tibbon — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:55:42 -0000

I've certainly seen people write some pretty horrid Rails code that took months of revision to get up to scale.

A few points:

1) Scaling is a database issue: While Ruby isn't the fastest language out there, scaling issues generally come from database problems. You can certainly get into a mess with ActiveRecord and not writing your own queries, or at least not thinking about what is happening. I saw one page that had in excess of 10,000 queries run per page load because someone wasn't thinking.

Should you run into an issue that is a speed bottleneck (such as parsing a large amount of JSON or something) then you just use C to build that part of a gem.

2) Good Rails programmers write tests- Lots of them. It is certainly possible to build a lot without ever writing a test, but that is true with any language. I don't remember my CS101 class in C/Java talking about testing upfront as much as any decent Rails/Ruby book will.

3) Rails for Rapid Prototyping- Rails is absolutely killer for rapid prototyping. It gets the idea done; quickly. Yea, that can hit scaling issues but I'd rather have a startup with scaling issues than nothing done at all or find that I'm 6 months behind the competition. Fixing scaling issues can cost money, but hopefully by the time you're at that point you're making money (or have at least obtained investment). When you do reach Twitter or Facebook size then you can take your millions of dollars, write your own custom NoSQL datastores and switch to Scala, or just write the entire thing in C. More startups die from the idea never happening than from scaling issues and I'd much rather have the latter.