Admittedly, most of the best have little interest in dealing with the LCBO. I suppose you too would think twice about selling wine to Ontario and its internationally feared state monopoly. Imagine this business scenario: First, you hold back an allocation for your Ontario agent in the hopes of getting an order. Then comes the expensive shipping of samples for evaluation if the initial tender is accepted. Then you’ll wait months for the order to be confirmed, then a few more months for the order to picked up, then a couple more months for actual shipping. Then you’ll pay $125 per wine type for the mandatory LCBO lab fees (and risk the entire shipment being rejected and returned at your expense, or simply destroyed). And then, you’ll patiently wait another few months for your payment, that’s if, of course, if the shipment sells well. If it doesn’t, the LCBO might arbitrarily put it on sale without telling you or the agent and deduct the difference from your payment. And don’t forget, all the while, you have buyers lining up at your cellar door, cash in hand, to get their allocation. What would you do?On the other hand, large producers with volumes of commercial wine to sell scramble to get an audience with the LCBO. Nothing could be easier then having one large customer take a whacking shipment of your everyday plonk in one go. And, you have a ‘state guarantee’ on your payment! It’s not like the LCBO is going bankrupt anytime soon or will disappear into the shadows like some shady Shanghai dealer.No wonder we see so much average wine. 

Its like we just don’t understand the way world works.  This is not good news for producers, but actually they find other places in the world for their products – and like water, flow where the business is better.  No one is sitting on piles of excellent wine they can’t sell, they are just going to markets that deserve them. Not to Ontario.  Not to you.  You have chosen differently.  You have chosen this model.

To get a sense for how perverse our approach to alcohol sales look no further than The Beer Store.  Again, a regulated monopoly for selling beer in Ontario – retail restaurants – with the most bizarre ownership structure imaginable. Surprising to most people in Ontario, unlike the LCBO, The Beer Store is actually private.  It is owned 49% by Anheuser-Busch (yes, Budweiser), 49% Molson Coors (Molson was bought by Coors in 2005) and 1 % by Sleeman Brewery (bought by Sapporo, Japan).

So say this with me: 

100% of the legislated monopoly in beer distribution and sales in Ontario is owned by 3 foreign corporations.

It’s not that different from legislating WalMart as the only legal distributor of durable home goods.  In fact its identical.

Why in this age of advertising and retail sophistication does The Beer Store look more like a recycling centre?  Because its not a retail store at all.  The Beer Store is not interested in selling *beer*.  That would imply at least passing interest in the product and the needs of customers.  An interest in developing the tastes and appreciation for its products.  Maybe even to opening your mind to new possibilities, featuring interesting new items, or introducing you to new beers you may not know about – even some made by the 25 Ontario Craft Brewers with truly exceptional products despite being structurally segregated from their local market.  This style of business development is anathema to The Beer Store.  what the store is designed for is primarily recycling and ordering one of the top few national beer brands – and lets face it that’s not exactly the good stuff.

As reported by the Toronto Star, in 2007 the Ontario Craft Brewery association (OCB) wanted to either acquire shares in The Beer Store or be permitted to set up their own competing chain. Premier McGuinty responded by saying that his government would not even consider any application to form a competing chain, and that his government would not consider compelling The Beer Store’s shareholders to sell any shares, although some Liberal and Conservative backbenchers have said they would expect The Beer Store to at least negotiate in good faith with craft brewers who made a serious offer. The Beer Store responded by saying that it was not considering and would not consider selling shares at any price…that in the event OCB did get to set up a competing chain, they would refuse to stock their products there.  Ouch.

So to those that travel the world, say to europe, and are impressed by the varieties of local brews remember: we chose this too.  We willfully choose for Ontario to be second class with limited generic selection of over priced products.  Through our actions this is our expressed desire.

Cheers.

Don’t worry about “not doing it right” and instead focus on how you are improving.  Where were you int he past and where are you now? What’s next?  Focus on that.  Too many times people assume that because their agile adoption is imperfect they are missing some critical part or have generally failed.  You may be right!  But, it doesn’t really matter.  In my experience you shouldn’t wait around for the perfect process/team/org adoption to arrive.  Just keep moving and keep improving.  Plan on team cohesion around a workable process taking a year or so.  Most of that year will seem pretty wonky but go with it and don’t fret.  Don’t sweat the fact that after 6 month your velocity is still erratic, or your stories are too open ended, or your product owner doesn’t have a vision (introduce them to Customer Development!), or that you can’t keep your standups focused, or that you don’t pair enough, or that storypoints don’t map to reality, or that you have too many bugs that they trow off your planning, or that you can’t really ship every iteration, or that you can’t test enough, or that you test too much, or…

Take a breath and keep going.

I liked XP as an engineer but from the business side of things found that it was limited to encouraging good engineering practices but not much else.  That’s when I learned about SCRUM – the agile methodology that adds the project management rituals that are compatible with the engineering practices of XP.  Great, I figured,  now I can really build cool products! Er…maybe.

Scrum is the way we run the AideRSS engineering group its what I’ve used at Mindreef and previously as well.  But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem – the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging – was figuring out what the product backlog should be.

The backlog is the answer to the question: “What is the most important work we should do right now?” it presumes that you could confidently make that list, and keep it up to date as things change – or at least articulate what you’re building and for whom.  Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.  How do you really make the best backlog for your company?

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say – they punt.  Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go.  Well, that’s fine as far as it goes but when you’re a startup and you don’t have customers yet you need a way to bootstrap and that can feel awfully chaotic and wasteful. What’s worse is that as you grow you’ve probably developed some pretty bad habits as far as setting priorities and strategy: like thinking you’re a genius – just because you got funded – and that genius is what allows you to *know* what the market wants.

Product Management is the generally accepted answer to the question above and though I love the folks at Pragmatic Marketing for their excellent offerings in this area, product management isn’t all that well connected to agile development, especially in a startup.

I recently listened to the VentureHacks podcast of Steve Blank’s talks at Stanford on the topic of “Customer Development”.  A blog post: “How to develop your customers the way you develop your product” links to resources that describe the idea.  Wrapping the iterative nature of agile development in another outer loop called Customer Development makes a ton of sense to me.  Its the first time I’ve seen an approach to the Market/Product fit problem that makes sense the same way agile makes sense to software developers.  I’m looking forward to digging into this some more and applying it to how we evolve at AideRSS.

Oh, some guy called Marc Andreessen things Steve’s book is nifty too.

Banks

Autos

There were several great talks.  My favorite was Damien Katz’s very personal story of cashing in his chips as a programmer @ IBM in Boston, selling the house, moving the family back home to Charlotte, NC to be nearer to family…all with any prospect of a job waiting for him.  I can seriously relate to that leap and it was inspiring to hear him relate the highs and lows that a change like that entails.  Damien says he knew peole worked on really cool projects and asked himself why he couldn’t be one of those people.  He took the leap and made it happen – with a wife and lovely baby girl besid ehim.  Apache CouchDB definitely counts as a cool project.  I love that Damien admitted to not knowing how to build CouchDB when he started.  But, he stuck it out and did it.  Props.

There were plenty of other highlights; I’m sure the live recordings of Zed Shaw will get noticed by the Ruby/Rails community.  I thought that was fun to watch but strangely self indulgent.  Maybe having 3 young kids at home has developed my appreciation for childish behavior – I enjoy watching them do silly stuff too.

• Mindreef acquired by Progress Software (Jeff Scheider)
  
• Progress makes another SOA acquisition: Mindreef (ZDNet)
• Progress Software Acquires Mindreef, Inc (Webservices.Org)
• Progress Software Announced Its Acquisition of Mindreef at SOA World Conference (SOA World Magazine)
• Progress makes another SOA buy (NetworkWorld)
• Progress now eats Mindreef … must be hungry (InfoWorld)
• Progress Software continues SOA buying spree with Mindreef acquisition (Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct)
• Progress Acquires Mindreef, Producer of SOA Collaborative Software (Joe McKendrick’s SOA in Action)
• SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef (SearchSOA)
• Progress Buys Two SOA Tool Vendors In Two Days (InformationWeek)

1 require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../foo')

You see this all the time at the top of Ruby source files? This is the Ruby Way?

I would expect to write:

1 require "../foo"

and have require – try matching against the requiring files directory first, then delegate to the LOAD_PATH array.

Help me see the light.

IONA has struggled to redefine themselves in the post CORBA, SOA world and I know that isn’t for lack of technical horsepower.  It will be interesting to see how Sonic/Actional + IONA develop the ESB market and how other SOA infrastructure evolves.

If my goals as a service provider are aligned with yours as a service consumer then good customer service is much more likely then if I view our relationship as adversarial – yet it seems that’s the normal case.  How many times have you asked someone in an obvious customer service capacity a question and are greeted by blocking and avoiding tactics instead of aligned effort at resolution?  This is often not the fault of the front line staff but a broken business process, with those responsible for its implementation and potentially fixing it tucked safely out of the way of reality.  If you’re tired of bad service or and/or are tired of fronting for a bad business process lets start looking upstream at the business culture and management practices that make this prevalent.

I attended Comunitech’s CEO Dinner last March and was hauled on stage for a lesson in humility by Marshall Goldsmith (along with Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz now of ParkVu (I hear ParkVu is hot new hansom cab startup in the area)).

The lesson of the evening was: “Do you treat your spouse as well as you treat your customers?”  Well, do you?

My liked the end when Randall raises the issue of mobile data rates and the inevitable dampening effect it has on Canadian (and American) mobile software development companies – startups especially.

The problem is more pronounced in Canada but the US has the same structural flaws – its just so much more pronounced here due to lesser competition, higher complacency, and more monopolistic tendencies.  But, in either case we are effectively giving up on wireless innovation in North America if we don’t have a startup ecosystem and fertile early markets to try out products and business models.  The only thing I see in the mobile space that is fertile these days is the bullshit in the ads.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that there is remarkably few multi-lingual programmers out there. You usually find people attached to a programming stack the way a baby duck attaches to its mother. Programmers follow around their stack quacking that its best/only way to solve their particular problem. I know we would like to think this doesn’t apply to us but I think most of us have been “baby ducked” early and that shapes how we look at the world for a good long while.

If you’re under 30 and build web stuff then you probably know PHP. Why is that? More than likely because its always been there and its free. Every cheap host has a PHP runtime available so that’s what you were “baby ducked” on. As you got more sophisticated you might have started to look at newer environments like Python or Ruby. Thats what everyone you talked to were talking about.
Alternatively if you work in a corporate environment theres a pretty good chance that you’re writing in Java or .NET. You don’t signup on godaddy + cheap host for these projects because you have an IT operations group that takes care of machines, app servers, databases and provisioning for you. YMMV.

These are 2 completely different worlds that have nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the stack and people around the stack. Web 2.0 style projects don’t use Java as a rule NOT because the syntax is wrong or its slow or anything like that. I don’t know of many cheap hosting providers that make Java or .NET available unless you get into dedicated or virtual private setups where you control the entire stack. They exist but are far from the norm – and they aren’t comparably cheap. Instead the model is around FTP of text files and interpreted languages since its easier to manage those environments in a shared host environment. So the ecosystem of people in that world have different expectations.

Enter Amazon EC2 and the larger cloud computing approach. We’re “baby ducking” a new generation of developers that think in terms of cheap utility cloud computing where you don’t FTP text files to a shared hosted server – you have control over the entire stack by default. You own the whole thing.

This shift makes Java development in the cloud a viable option especially to ex-enterprise developers that are de-siloing their applications, systems or selves to reach beyond their firewalled-gardens and out into the Internet at large. Mix-in the emerging renaissance of new languages that target the JVM but offer technical or programmer productivity advantages and the JVM may not look so staid and corporate as it used to.

So we may see an increasing number of enterprise Java developers (ducks) that participate in Web 2.0 style projects after all.

Disagree?

Here’s to our evolution to better subscription management!

1. In the beginning, I would subscribe willy-nilly to feeds, like I was hoarding streams of Internet knowledge, kind of like Diggs or De.licio.us links often with the same filter.  It didn’t take long before I accumulated significant attention debt and would feel increasingly inadequate when I’d get through less and less of my subscriptions each day. Like any addict, this didn’t change my desire to hoard feeds continuing at 5-10 / week.

2. Eventually I bucketed my feeds in 2 categories, not wanting to go overboard building some contrived hierarchy of folders or tagging system that I’d never use. So bucket #1 was called Favorites and bucket #2 was called Monitor. I’d try to keep up on all posts in my Favorites bucket and just sorta hunt and peck through the Monitor bucket. It took about a week before I never looked in the Monitor bucket and my Favorites was my new tape worm of time.

Coincidentally (or not), Jeff Fedor mentioned that AideRSS might help “Read what matters“. That appealed to me for obvious reasons. I started using the AideRSS service to process feeds for many of the subscriptions I was Monitoring. It was pretty intriguing and once I had some feeds pared down and wired up in my reader I felt on top of things. But it took a few too many clicks to keep up with – so new unfiltered feeds started to creep in.

3. Enter the AideRSS Google Reader Extension. Available today is a customization of GoogleReader done inside your FireFox browser, the AideRSS FireFox addin brings the filtering of feeds directly inside the GoogleReader experience, simplifying reading and managing feeds. So now you subscribe to feeds then dial in the filter to go from all posts to good, great or just the best. This can cut a feed volume down by an order of magnitude.

Heres a screen shot of the filtering in action:

You can install the extension at http://gr.aiderss.com/

Congrats guys – nice job!