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What is an MVP and why do you care?

I was recently published over on the Go Code Colorado blog. I wrote about what a minimum viable product (aka MVP) is. When I talked to teams at last years competition, one recurring theme was how much people wanted to spend time building rather than talking to users.

I have been there! I know it is much more fun to build something than it is to try to find people of whom to ask questions.

But it’s much better for the long term viability of your project to build something people want poorly than something no one wants perfectly.

More over at the Go Code Colorado blog.

Business Startup | moore |

Announcing: Letters to a New Developer

Blank paper, pencil, lightbulb, eraserI’ve been working on a new project that I’m excited to share here. It’s called Letters to a New Developer. It’s a blog with over forty posts full of advice for people who are just starting out in the field of development.

So much of development is not about code. It’s about teams and processes and organizations and questions. I feel like the traditional education system (whether four year college or bootcamp) does a good job of teaching folks coding fundamentals (what you need to be a programmer) but there is so much more to being a successful developer than coding. In my experience, delivering code is a necessary but not sufficient activity for success in a software company.

That’s why I’ve spent the last five months writing up some of my experiences and learnings.

The posts are mostly mine, but some are from guest posters who bring a different perspective. I also excerpt posts I find on the Internet that I find helpful, so that I can stand on the shoulders of some of the giants who have come before.

Here are some of my favorite Letters To a New Developer posts: Always Be Journaling from Brooke Kuhlmann, Get Used to Failure, and Learning to Read Code is More Important Than Learning to Write It.

I hope you find this project as fun to read as I’ve found it to write.

Blog Business Side Project Technology | moore | | Leave a comment

Ideas for marketing a dev centric product

I have a friend who has a company that produces a developer tool that provides a one stop shop for application authentication. It’s a good one and they’ve found some traction.

They are trying to follow the redhat/mongodb playbook–create a tool so good at solving developer problems that developers adopt it. Eventually some portion of enterprises will wake up one morning and realize that their developers are using this. The CIO will freak out and be happy to pay money to my friend’s company for support.

The question is, how do you get developers to find out about the solution and how it will make their lives better?

I am not a marketing guru, but I am a developer and have been involved in selling of software in the past, so I had some suggestions.

  • Read The New Kingmakers, by Stephen O’Grady, in particular “Courting the Developer Population” and “What to Do?”. You can get a PDF here. O’Grady has thought a lot about this problem and his blog is worth reading as well.
  • Find or create a community, and contribute to it. Depending on your audinence, this may be a reddit subforum, an old school php bbedit forum, a facebook group or even an IETF working group. An existing group is more likely to give you results, where a new group will give you more control. Aim for results.
  • Present case studies or testimonials of success using the software. How did a real person solve a real problem with your software?
  • If you can find analysts and/or bloggers focused in your problem space, contact them and offer to walk them through the solution. (To me, this seems more of a long shot, but could be a big hit if you find the right person.) Developer focused podcasts could be an option too, as long as you are talking about technology and the problem space, not your product.
  • Writing interesting content on your blog. Share it widely. Again, this doesn’t have to be about your product, in fact it shouldn’t. Instead, take topics you’ve learned by building your product, or in the communities of which you are part, or the problems developers have solved with your product, and highlight those topics.
  • Write talks for conferences. For developers, I’d look at conferences like gluecon and oscon. Meetups are good too–easier to get into but much less scalable. You attend virtual meetups as well as physical ones.
  • Set up a google alert for competitors’ names and keywords and see if you can add value to any discussions happening there.

Above all, don’t be salesy. Focus on making the developer’s life easy.

Business Security Useful Tools | moore |

Ever felt like your codebase was out of control?

I certainly have. A couple of times in my career the combination of technical debt, business model shift and lack of time for a proper fix have left me feeling out of control.

But reading this post on Hacker News made me realize that it all could have been so so much worse. A couple of “best ofs”:

To give you some examples, I originally came on as a contractor because they had some refactoring they wanted done. The entire system was home built (including the programming language) and there was a file size limit of 32,767 lines. They had many functions that were approaching this limit and they didn’t know what to do, so they hired me.

and:

Once upon a time, there was a search product and one of the data sources that it could search was a Solr/Lucene database. This should be no problem, since search is what Solr does. It should be as simple as passing the user’s query through to Solr and then reading the response. The problem was, it was important to know exactly which parts of any matched records were relevant to the search.

 

The Guy Before Me™ decided that the best way to implement this would be to split the user’s search into individual words, perform a separate search query through Solr’s HTTP API for each individual word, and then do a bunch of very clever and complex post-processing on the result sets to combine them into a single set of results.

and (last one, I promise):

At my first gig I teamed up with a guy responsible for a gigantic monolith written in Lua. Originally, the project started as a little script running in Nginx. Over the course of several years, it organically grew to epic proportions, by consuming and replacing every piece of software that it interfaced with – including Nginx.

 

There were two ingredients in the recipe for disaster. The first is that Lua comes “batteries excluded”: the standard library is minimalist and the community and set of available packages out there is small. That’s typically not an issue, as long as one uses Lua in the intended way: small scripts that extend existing programs with custom user logic (e.g. Nginx, Vim, World of Warcraft). The second is that Lua is a dynamic language: it’s dynamically typed, and practically everything can be overridden, monkey patched and hacked, down to the fundamental iterators that allow you to traverse data structures.

shivers. There, but for the grace of God.

Programming Tips | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS Advent Amazon Machine Learning Post

Last year I wrote about AWS Advent, which is an exploration of the vast reaches of AWS in the first 24 days of December. This year, I submitted a post for it. And that post is now up and available. I wrote about Machine Learning (ML) generally and Amazon Machine Learning (AML) specifically. From the post:

AML Models are immutable, as are data sources. If you need to incorporate ongoing data into your model, which is generally a good idea, you need to automate your datasource and model building process so they are repeatable. Then, when you have new data, you can rebuild your model, test it out, and then change which model is “in production” and making predictions.

Plenty more stuff in there about the ethics of ML and the various pieces of the AML pipeline. Check it out.

 

Amazon Machine Learning AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

Moving a database driven side project to Netlify

FishermanI recently moved a side project to Netlify. Netlify, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a static file hosting service with a great workflow, free SSL certificates, and a built in CDN. I made the move because the side project was a database driven site, but didn’t really use other server side interactivity (no user generated content, etc). I haven’t invested much in the side project over the past couple of years, but it still gets tens of hits a day and is useful to a users. It’s a top hit on google for certain keywords. I didn’t want to spend time updating the underlying application, but wanted it to be more secure. The site is only updated over a month or so every year. It is then read only for the next eleven months of the year, as it provides information on a very seasonal service.

Moving to Netlify (or, frankly, any other static site provider) provides the following benefits:

  • extremely low cost (Netlify is free for the level of traffic I have).
  • faster browsing experience for the end user (due to being behind a CDN).
  • free SSL certificates, with no hassle of setting up letsencrypt myself.
  • indirection–the source site can now be anywhere. I could put it on an ec2 instance that I only boot up when I need to push a new build, or could even host it locally. This means that I don’t need to worry about the updating the source application.

I could have chosen to do this with S3/Cloudfront/AWS Certificate manager/Lambda (or using technologies from some other cloud provider). But even though I’m familiar with all the steps to do this, it was lot of work. And Netlify was free and had done all the grunt work of bringing all these technologies (or similar ones, I’m not familiar with the tech behind the site, but they do write about it a bit).

What steps did I take to move a database driven directory site to Netlify? Enough that I wanted to document this for my future self.

  • Change the DNS for the site to have a lower TTL. During the transition from your site to Netlify, users may see versions served from either the old site or the new site, and you want to minimize that.
  • Remove all forms and other server side interactivity that your site has. You can replace them with javascript driven interactivity (like Disqus for comments). Netlify has some support for functions, but I didn’t explore that.
  • Set up Netlify using a default URL (they provide it, it is something like ‘foo-bar-123.netlify.com’). I deploy from Bitbucket. (I know some people hate on Bitbucket, and I don’t like all of their UI, but they are free for private repos, which is a win for me.) This let me understand how to deploy a simple one page site.
  • Download the site. I used wget: wget -mk http://mysite.com/ . The switches set up mirroring and convert all links to be relative.
  • Move the site to a subdirectory (I used web) and configure Netlify to deploy the HTML from that subdirectory. This lets you have other scripts outside of the webroot that can help you build the site.
  • Check in the site with the downloaded content and push it up to Bitbucket.
  • Watch the site be deployed to the Netlify default URL.
  • Access the site via SSL: ‘https://foo-bar-123.netlify.com’ and look in the console for “mixed active content” errors. Fix those as applicable. (If this was for a client, rather than a side project, I’d solve all of these.) Note that if the source site is http only, you may need to hardcode https URLs.
  • See that “pretty” html pages like ‘https://foo-bar-123.netlify.com/about’ are rendered as text.
  • Ask on Stackoverflow about the problem.
  • End up solving it by generating a _headers file after downloading the site. Update Stackoverflow question with the answer.
  • Test again that the site at the default URL looks good.
  • Update the webserver config and DNS for the database driven site. I wanted it to answer to both the old addresses: mysite.com/www.mysite.com and a new address: generator.mysite.com
  • Update DNS to point mysite.com and www.mysite.com to the Netlify site. Instructions here.
  • Wait for DNS to propagate. When it does, check to make sure that SSL works.
  • Add a password for generator.mysite.com
  • Test the download process with the password (the wget command changes to wget --user=USER --password=PASS -mk http://mysite.com/
  • Write a script to do the download process.
#!/bin/sh
wget -mk  --user=USER --password=PASS http://generator.mysite.com/
mv generator.mysite.com mysitecom
cd mysitecom
find `pwd` -type f |grep  -v \\. |sed "s#`pwd`/##" > list 
for i in `cat list`; do echo "/$i" >> _headers; echo "  Content-Type: text/html" >> _headers; done
rm list
cd ..
rm -rf web
mv mysitecom web
git add web
git commit -m "pull in latest from generator.mysite.com"
# could do a git push here as well if you wanted

Now, any time that I make changes to the site, I need to run this script and push to Netlify. I could put it in cron or a scheduled lambda if I thought I was going to make changes often. For now, I’m content to run it manually. One downside is that I self-host my analytics code and that site is not SSL enabled. So I’ll need to make a change if I want to continue to get statistics.

So, in the end I have a fast, secure site that is hosted outside my infrastructure and that is easy to update. This process, while not trivial, was easy enough that it has me thinking about where else I could use it (this blog, for instance). Highly recommend.

AWS Content Side Project Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Excited to be speaking at Develop Denver

Coffee break at a conferenceI’m excited to be speaking at Develop Denver. This is a local conference with a wide variety of topics of interest to developers, designers and in general anyone who works in the interactive industry. From their website, they want to:

[bring] together developers, designers, strategists, and those looking to dive deeper into the interactive world for two days of hands on code & design talks.

I’ll be doing two presentations. The first is my talk on Amazon Machine Learning, which I’ve presented previously. The second is a lightning talk on the awk programming language. I’m excited to be presenting, but I’m also looking forward to interesting talks from other speakers, covering topics such as IoT, software development for the developing world, web scraping, APIs, oauth, software development, and hiring practices. (That list is tilted toward my interest in development–there’s plenty for everyone.)

If you’re able to join, it’s happening in about two weeks in downtown Denver (Oct 18-19 in the RiNo district). Here’s the link for tickets, and here’s the agenda.

Amazon Machine Learning Conferences Presentations | moore | | 2 Comments

Fifteen years

Birthday cakeWow. 15 years ago today I wrote my first post. Thank you for reading!

I’ve been blogging for longer than I’ve done any other activity in my life. Longer than any job, any romantic relationship, any hobby.

And I can’t see stopping. Sure, I may use other outlets, but I’m trying to keep the streak of no month going by without a post going (darn you, November 2011!). I think that writing is an essential part of software development and it’s been an essential part of my reflective process. I primarily blog for myself. But it is still fun when folks reach out to me and let me know my writing has helped them in some way. It’s also fun when I google a problem and realize that I’ve already written up an answer.

I encourage everyone I meet to blog. It is a fantastic way to accumulate credibility and expertise. (You never learn something as well as when you are trying to explain it to others.) It also gives me a chance to expound on some of my thoughts around jobs, business, and software development. I’m lucky that my work almost always is something interesting enough to write about, at least once a month. Maybe one of these days I’ll put together a ‘best of’ and make a PDF.

I also think it is important to blog at a place you control. Yes, Medium or Facebook make it easier to gain a following. But what they giveth, they can taketh away. I may only have limited engagement here on this blog, but what I write is mine and will never be anyone else’s.

Hard to believe that my blog will be able to drive next year. Again, thanks for reading.

Blog | moore | | Leave a comment

What makes you a better developer, working at an early stage startup or working in a team?

Bike courierI gave a presentation at Boulder.rb last night about my experience being the technical co-founder of a startup for two years. After the presentation, someone asked a really interesting question. Between working as a solo co-founder of a startup or working in a larger team at an established company, which experience makes you a better developer?

First, a digression. I often commute around town by bike. There are many benefits to doing so, but one of the ones I think about a lot is being on a bike gives you the ability to move through streets more freely. Specifically, you can switch between acting like a car (riding on the road) and acting like a pedestrian (riding on the sidewalk). Used judiciously, this ability can get you places faster than either (hence, bike messengers).

In my mind, a true developer is like that. They can bounce between the world of software (and across the domains within it) and the world of business to solve problems in an efficient manner.

Back to the question at hand. I think that the answer is based on what you mean by better. Are you looking to gain:

  • customer empathy
  • ability to get stuff done through barriers of ignorance and resource constraint
  • a wide set of experience across a lot of different software related domains (security, operations, ux, data modelling, requirements gathering, planning, bug fixing, etc)

If getting these skills make you into the better kind of developer you want to be, you will be well served by being a technical co-founder or founding engineer (more thoughts about the distinction here).

If on the other hand, you are looking for:

  • deep knowledge of a smaller subset of the software world
  • the ability to design software for long term maintainability and performance
  • experience working with a team of stakeholders, each with a different perspective on the problem you are solving

then you are seeking a place on a team, with process, code reviews, conference attendance and free snacks (most likely).

Who is a better developer? The person with experience working with (possibly leading) a team and deep knowledge of a subset of technology? Or the person who can be a jack of all trades and take a product from an idea to something customers will pay for?

I’m going to leave you with the canonical consultant’s answer: “It depends.” The former I’d call an expert programmer and the latter a true developer. They are both extremely valuable, but are good in different companies situations.

Jobs Presentations Startup | moore | | Leave a comment

Amazon Alexa

I had a lot of fun working on a one day ‘hackfest’ project with Amazon Alexa. I learned a lot about voice UX and Alexa implementation details.It’s an interesting platform, especially if you have broad brand recognition and can deliver high level valuable information via short chunks of text.

From my blog post on the Culture Foundry site:

The multi step interaction is a bit clunky, but I think it’s a great way to avoid collisions between different skills. Basically, the user calls out an ‘invocation’ like ‘open color picker’. Interactions with Alexa after that are send directly to that particular skill until an end point is reached in the interaction tree. Each of these interactions is triggered by a different voice command, and is handled by something called an ‘intent’. Intents can have multiple triggering commands (‘what is my favorite color’ vs ‘what is my color’, for example). There’s also a lightweight, session level storage while the entire invocation is occurring, which means you can easily pass data between intents without reaching out to a more persistent data storage.

You can read the whole post over there.

APIs AWS | moore | | Leave a comment