It’s pretty tough looking after 9 projects, a lot of things to keep an eye on. It’s even harder when some of the projects use a totally different process to the others. We are a Scrum shop, we follow the scrum process – mostly. Recently a few of our projects started to use Kanban, which is a learning experience.

Keeping an eye on 9 Scrum projects is made easier by the Scrum Check that Gwyn put together. A simple checklist of things to look for each day on each project. The idea is that as it’s so easy to miss things that are not there, but should be, write out a list of what should set up, and check it each day. That way if I forget to send out invites to the next demo (for example), it turns up in the Scrum Check.

Kanban is a different process, which leads to the question of what things should I be looking for, on a day to day basis, to give me an early warning is the process is derailing.

At a first iteration, I have the following checks, (if the answer to any question is no, then thats a sign something might be wrong, and I need to investigate)

Daily Checks

1. Can I see the Kanban Board?
2. Has it changed since yesterday?
3. Are any of the columns empty?
4. Are all of the columns under the WIP limit?
5. Do the columns actually describe the flow of work?
6. Are all stories unblocked (by a definition relavent to that column)?

Weekly Checks

Once again, Facebook has rolled out some new changes, and once again my news stream is filled with updates along the lines of “Facebook has ruined MY internet” (come on, it wasn’t intended as a personal insult). The changes in question are the addition of lists as a first class entity (in the interface – they were there in the features before), some automatically grouped lists, and the idea of top stories. Actually there is also the new Subscribe button, but judging from the majority of the messages I see, that hasn’t been noticed by most people. I’m in a different camp though, I think the changes are a step in the right direction, and my only complaint is that they don’t go far enough!

I used to work in a social network startup, we were going to take over the internet, and replace Facebook as the number one social destination, along with every other social network startup in 2007/2008. We really didn’t understand marketing (specifically that “Naked” was a really bad brand name) nor did we understand just how complex the technology behind Facebook was to reproduce, which is why we went out of business. We did understand one thing though, which was that as more and more people use social networks, the signal to noise ratio is going to get worse, and controlling what messages you send to who, and what messages you get from who is going to be more and more important.

The Problem

I use Facebook, and I use Twitter, and I have dabbled on Google +, and they are all struggling with the same problem. Let me try and explain what that problem is.

I send and receive messages on a few different subjects: Dance, Photography, Agile development, Web development and personal stuff (such as going for a beer this evening). Also, I am friends with Haje, who sends messages on a range of different topics: Photography, writing, travelling, and going for beers this evening. All three social networks let me group my friends (Facebook and twitter call this lists, and Google + calls it circles, but they are the same thing). I can put Haje in my “Photographers” List/Circle, and I can put him in my “Beer Buddies” List/Circle.

All three networks are encouraging us to group our contacts like this, it means I can then filter what I see (which in turn means I get more out of being on the network and I will come back). I can choose to see just my photographer friends, and catch up on photography, or just my dance friends, and catch up on dance. This is great, and is what Google + and Twitter have had for a while. Actually Facebook had it for a long time too, but their interface was terrible! So bad that very few people even noticed the feature (all this latest change really does is show off that they have the same features as Twitter and Google +).

This is actually pretty awesome, when Haje posts an cool post about photography, I can find it easily in my “Photographers” list.  However the messages he sends about writing and travelling, which are not my thing (nothing against what he says, its just a subject I’m not interested in) or about meeting for beer  (which I am interested in) all turn up in my photographers list . This is just wrong, It makes my “Photographers” list harder to read, because, guess what, most photographers talk about other stuff too! (Not all of them – but that is another story).

It gets worse. Because Haje is in my “Beer Buddies” list, all those same messages appear in that list too. I just read them in my “Photographers” list!

My friends are not one dimensional

The idea of grouping friends into lists really doesn’t work, because my friends are not one dimensional people who only have one type of relationship, or one thing they are interested in.

What is really needed, is a way to set up lists that filter posts not based on who they are from, but a combination of who they are from, and what they are about. That way I can go to my photographers list, and just see photography based messages. That would be something I actually find useful. Twitter has hashtags, which are the closest I have seen to this, but they are not good enough. The message sender has to tag what subjects a message is about (hard enough with compose a message in 140 characters, try categorising it too!), and I have to be listening to that *exact* tag. Plus at the moment it only lets you filter by hashtag, not by a combination of hashtag and people you follow.

To be fair, what I’m asking for is hard, really very hard. Think of something difficult, and its a lot harder than that. But I’m pretty sure that whichever of the three big social networks gets there first, is going to take a big lead.

Photo: teegardin

Do you think of writing a webapp in similar terms to creating a startup? I think that they are in very similar. Let me explain to you why, and see if you agree.

I’ve been building and coding webapps for many years now. I have experience of working in a startup that went bust, and I have experienced working as a consultant helping other businesses create their webapps from first principles, as well as working for large corporations building large application. I have build several side projects, and tried running them as businesses, including my latest project, Frozen Event. So I think I have a pretty good range of experience to draw from to back up this argument.

What is a startup…

In order to explain what I mean, let me first explain what I mean when I say “startup”. I’m thinking of something different to what I suspect you are picturing right now. It’s not about being cash strapped, or working out of your parents basement. It’s more about trying to build a business. Building a way of doing work you can in some way sell.

But what does “Building a way of doing work” mean? If you think about any successful business. They know how they work. Anyone from McDonalds to the tailor who makes my dance trousers. They know how they greet a customer on first contact, how to market to them, and how to reliably deliver the product the customer wants. All of this together is “a way of doing work”.

Now think of a startup (it doesn’t matter what industry). They are figuring this out. They don’t yet know what marketing is going to work, what steps are needed to time and time again deliver a reliable product. This is the essence of a startup. They don’t yet know how they work. But they are in the process of figuring it out. Once they have figured it out, they are not longer a startup.

What does that have to do with webapps?

Can you say that the code is the most important part of any webapp you have launched? I can’t, in every example I can think of, the most important part is the way the user experiences the site (I’m not talking about UX, but what I would call concept design). It is also normally the hardest part to get right. Building a webapp for a clients lets me see this time and time again on a variety of different projects.

Typically we start off with an idea of what we want the site to achieve, maybe it’s to increase the number of phone calls to a bookings service, or encourage more sales for an e-commerce site. Sometime we will also have an idea of how to do it, but not always. As we build the site, we start to think about questions like “Does the user need to log in in order to do what we want them to do?”, “What happens after they take whatever action we are trying to get them to do”, and similar questions.

Let me give you an example. For Frozen Event (a site which allows photographers to sell photos) I’m considering some from of bulk discount. Something along the lines of if a user buys one photos the price is £2, 5 photos is £7 and 10 photos is £10. But there are several things I don’t know… What if a user buys 5 photos from one photographer, and 5 from a second photographer. The user is likely to expect to pay £10 for 10 photos, and each photographer is going to expect to receive £7 for selling 5 photos. It’s not immediatly clear how to resolve that.

The specific questions can vary a lot from site to site, and each one has to be considered on a case by case basis. However in the early stages, we don’t know how they work. At least not yet.

Can you see the analogy yet – how this is the same as a startup? We start of not yet knowing how it works. As we proceed into the project, it is a task exploration and discovery. Working out what it is we need to do, and how it needs to be done. There is no predefined set of steps to take, no map. Because if there were, then we would just be duplicating a system that already exists.

At least, that has been my experience of building webapps, it is also why its always interesting. Each new project brings a new set of questions, and a fresh set of chalenges to keep me fresh. If you have had a different experience or viewpoint I would love to hear it in the comments below.

Foreman is a gem that allows you to define what processes an (rails) app needs to run. For example background workers, pubsub etc.

Typically I like to deploy my applications to at least two environments: staging and production, not to mention running it in development locally. I had to do a bit of wrangling to get Forman to do this. Specifically I need to start my services using different rails environments, and Foreman does not seem have have built in support for this. (Heroku seem to not care about environments in the Procfile  - I assume they have their own magic way of dealing with this)

First I set up a directory

config/procfiles

and in there I put the following to files

production.proc
-------------------
worker: RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake jobs:work

and

staging.proc
---------------
worker: RAILS_ENV=staging bundle exec rake jobs:work

Then I added the following Capistrano tasks into deploy.rb (which handle installing and restarting the processes as upstart scripts on my server)

  namespace :services do

    desc "Restart all the services"
    task :restart do
      run "#{sudo} restart #{application}"
    end

    desc "Wipe and recreate the upstart scripts - (also restarts the services)"
    task :reinstall do

      raise "STOP!!!" if application.nil?

      begin
        run "#{sudo} stop #{application}"
      rescue
        # don't care if we can't stop. just means it wasn't running
      end

      run "#{sudo} rm -f /etc/init/#{application}*"

      run "cd #{current_path}; #{sudo} bundle exec foreman export upstart /etc/init -a #{application} -f #{current_path}/config/procfiles/#{stage}.proc -u #{user} -c worker=1"     

      # Insert command to start service at boot time NOTE this does not work on the mac version of sed which is not GNU sed
      run "#{sudo} sed -i '1 i start on runlevel [2345]' /etc/init/#{application}.conf"
      run "#{sudo} start #{application}"
    end

    after "deploy:update", "deploy:services:reinstall"
  end

Now I can run cap staging deploy (I’m using capistrano-multistage) and it will stop all my services, setup up the right upstart scripts (in case I have changed the Procfiles) and restart my services

There are many things you can do with a Coke can or two, or 48 in this case. Olly decided to try a new lunchtime exercise…

We all know prototyping something is the best way to find out quickly if its a good idea, and it turns out it only takes 48 cans of coke  and a spare desk-top to convert a normal desk into a standing one…

Let me know if you have tried working with a standing desk

I was inspired today by a post on Rachel Davies’ blog to write something that has been brewing in my mind for some time. So today I want to share with you the concept of commitment debt.

Towards the end of 2010, I tried mapping my own projects, work, social, personal etc, and fitting them onto a Kanban board. (If you don’t know what a Kanban board is, its not that important right now, you just need to know that its a way of visualising your current workload, so that you can see and visualise what unnecessary work you are doing. You can read more about using Kanban for personal productivity here)

What I discovered shocked me! The number of simultaneous things I had going on at once was about 25, and I was still accepting more!

I was in commitment debt!

I had taken on far more commitments than I was able to deliver. Just like financial or technical debt, it was slowing me down, preventing me from being able to choose what to do. It was even starting to get me down.

I had to go though each project, and work out which ones I could just cancel, on the spot, which ones I could postpose, which ones I was totally committed to and could not get out of.

Then for several months, I picked a project each week, and focused my spare time on it, and slowly starting to bring them to completion.

I then had to do the same to several projects that I had been able to postpose, but could not get out of.

Finally I was able to look at the projects I had been able to cancel. Most of them were no longer relevant. Some where never even a good idea in the first place! I can only assume I was taking them on to procrastinate on the commitments I already had!

So just like financial debt. I had to prioritise and start to repay the most serious debts first.

Is this something you have experience yourself, or seen in others? Have you found any good techniques for getting out of this problem, or spotting it before it becomes too serious? Let me know in the comments below

Its rare that I come across a new company doing something creative, doing it well, and making me think “wow! this is cool” so when I do, I feel I ought to shout about it…

In our office we just shared a round of handmade bespoke liqueurs, served from an old style Alchemsist test tubes. They were lovely!

You can get your own set, to liven up your party, or Friday afternoon in the office by heading over to www.alchemistdreams.co.uk

One of the reasons that I wrote my most recent project, HabitualApp, was the work and reading I have been doing over the past two years or so on personal growth.

Of all the ideas and concepts I came across, one of the hardest to really get to grips with, or to “internalise”, is understanding how to accept reality as it is, rather than focusing on what I think it should be (or want it to be). This is often called ‘self acceptance’ when it refers to looking at yourself, who you are right now, and accepting it.

Self Acceptance – Accepting Reality

My difficulty was understanding how I could accept things about me, and yet still have a goal to improve. How could I set a goal to get better at something, and at the same time accept that my current ability is OK? This seemed like a direct conflict.

Eventually I started to differentiate between accepting things as they are, and understanding what I want them to be. I realised that can be distinct concepts. This is a bit abstract, so let me take an example:

I often have ideas that are quite complex and theoretical and I want to share these with my friends. So I write something, or sit down with a friend, and talk them through my latest idea. They don’t understand me, and I get very frustrated. In a few cases, we even end up arguing about it. This was not something that I wanted.

However, I had to accept a simple fact. My communication skills were what they were. They were not great (and maybe still aren’t :-)). Fine OK. This didn’t make me a bad person. This didn’t make me a failure. It is nothing more than a fact. Like my height.

Here is the hard part, the bit that I really struggled to internalise. While it is OK to not be great at communicating, it is ALSO ok to want to change it. They are not mutually exclusive. This was a realisation, and when combined with one additional idea, it became very powerful.

Self Responsibility – Shaping Reality

That idea is “self responsibility”. Once I have accepted that I want to be better at communicating. I take responsibility for it. Personally I think “taking responsibility” consists of two aspects:

1. I want something to change
2. I realise it will only change if I make it change.

This leaves me in a state where I am OK saying I’m not a great communicator. I’m OK saying I want to be a better communicator, and I know that I will get better only if I do something to actually get better. After that, I found it impossible to not do something about it. I would actually get uncomfortable if I didn’t spend time working on improving it.

In this case I decided to do a series of conference talks. By pushing myself to present ideas to a group of people I was able to practice different communication styles, and get useful feedback. I was lucky enough to have a colleague I could work closely with, and easy access to a community who were able to give good feedback. However if that had not been the case I would have still found a suitable audience.

Internalising these two concepts into my daily experience has had two noticeable effects. The first is that I am a lot less stressed. When I notice something in my life that is not right, there is no associated feeling of guilt, which means there is no stress. This has allowed me to be more honest with myself about who, and what I am. The second effect I noticed is that I am significantly more successful at actually changing those things in my life I want to change. I have even noticed an improvement in self esteem as a result.

One of the tools that I have been using to explore these changes is 30 day trial habits. This was the reason I wrote HabitualApp.

Less than a week ago I launched HabitualApp. Given that my day job is creating webapps this isn’t something I would normally make a big deal of. However this site was different – I wrote it entirely on my own. That meant I had to do:

• Concept Design (what is the app, why does it exsit)
• Usability Design
• Visual Design
• Software Design
• Styling (writing the css/html)
• Programming
• Marketing

I’m a big fan of cross functional teams, but the truth is normally there is quite a broad team behind an app, and its rare for one person to be able to do all of the above. To make things even more challenging, I had set myself the target of launching the site by the last day of 2010. That was just 23 days after I initially had the idea!

For a long time I have wanted to create a site, launch it as quickly as possible, and then grow it from there. This is something that not everyone is comfortable with; there are a lot of potential problems with launching a site before it is ready. So working on my own was the best way to have the freedom to do exactly what I wanted to do.

The sitehas been running for 6 days now, and its going pretty well. It has had over 1300  unique visitors, and over 90 users have signed up. It’s time I take a quick look back at what I leaned so far, and what I want to find out next.

Limiting the features let me launch early

The first thing was that writing a web app from scratch in less than 1 month is totally possible. I wasn’t particularly pressed for time, even though I did most of the work in evenings and lunch times (though I did manage a good bit of work during the holidays). The only way I could launch something in such a short time though was to be ruthless at cutting out features.

The login system piggybacks on Facebook, which was a great time saver, as well as giving several added features for free. I had a lot of ideas for features I wanted to add, (and still want to add) but I was pretty ruthless at cutting them down to the smallest set possible. This was necessary as I did the final bit of coding the day before launch (I wanted to have one day to reflect before hitting the big red button)

This was the hardest part. Ideas fell into three basic categories: Ones the app is unusable without, things the app would be dull and boring without, and those which are nice to have. Telling the difference between the last two categories is a difficult to get right and something I suspect I will get better at with time.

One example is that when you create a habit, it posts this to your Facebook account. Clearly the app is usable without this, but I decided to put it in anyway. I decided that the social aspect was an important part of the app, and without this, using the app would feel too much of a solitary experience. The same goes with the list of habits your friends have, which is shown when you log in.

A bit of knowledge on design theory goes a LONG way

I learned that I can do visual design! Ok, the site is not going to win any awards for being pretty, but I don’t think it’s going to end on anyone’s ugly list either. I spent some time teaching myself basic colour theory using sites likes worqx (opposing colours on the colour wheel look good together, etc.) before using an open source colour scheme and getting on with it.

I found it very useful to have a limited set of five colours, and some basic ideas on when to use them made a huge difference. I had three different shades of my main colour, with two highlight colours. I also used some ideas on column spacing as explained in the 960 grid system, which helped keep things feeling balanced.

Watching real users is invaluable

After the first couple of features were working I started getting friends to use the app while I watched. I started with other computer developers, and moved onto less technically skilled friends. At each point I managed to hold my frustration back (“Isn’t it OBVIOUS you click that button!”) instead noting where they were confused about what to do. After each session with a user I would spend some time improving the usability of where they were struggling the most. By the time I launched I was able to show a friend the site, and she could do all the main tasks with no prompting from me.

Design is iterative (both usability and visual design)

After 5 days or so I did the first pass at styling the app. I thought it looked pretty cool, till I looked at it again on day 6. Looking at it with fresh eyes made several things stand out and look ugly. The same was true with the usability of the site. Both designs were changed once or twice in a big way, and had a whole slew of little tweaks. The final design is quite different from the first one, but grew out of it. If I hadn’t actually done the first design, I would not have had the chance to develop it. The fact that design is iterative was new to me. I have often worked with designers who keep changing bits of pieces of the design. Now I have a much better feel for why they do it (of course, even their first drafts are better than anything I can do!)

Driving traffic to the app is harder than I thought

When I announced the app, I posted it on my twitter feed, and on my blog, and sat back hoping to see some people sign up. I figured I had enough followers and subscribers to get at least a few signups. Wrong. No-one signed up. Oops!

So I started pinging people directly, only one person really took the bait (and a few signed up to keep me happy). This was when I realised that getting traffic to the site was going to be harder that I thought. My ideas of just building an app and letting the traffic build up totally on its own was going to fail if no-one at all ever saw it.

I submitted the app to Facebook, which let me push the app out to my Facebook friends. Rather than spamming everyone, I decided to keep it targeted to those people whom I thought would be interested. I had to guess who that would be, so one thing I want to do for next time is get a pre-prepared list of who wants to know about my app launches (You can now sign up to get notified when I launch a new WebApp). This generated maybe three or four more sign-ups. Things were not looking great.

Then I got my first real break. My friend Haje wrote this post on Pixiq, and posted on his twitter account. Haje has quite a large following of photographers (which he earned by writing a lot of good content over several years) and was inspired to use daily habits to help people improve their photography. That provided a wave of users. I was able to get to a computer in time to add a photography habit to the list of recommended habits users see on first log-in, and that is still the most popular habit on the site.

My second break came from Lifehacker. They posted this article on habit forming, which I found via a twitter search on “habit” at the same time as I was told about it by one of the Facebook friends I had sent the app too. A good part of the article is very closely aligned with what my app does, so I didn’t feel at all bad about adding a comment mentioning the main difference and linking to my app. There was some confusion here as my comment didn’t appear at once. Turns out to prevent spammers they manually approve the first comment from each poster. So I had to wait several hours before my comment appeared. I suspect this is common on many popular sites that can generate a lot of traffic.

I was very lucky with both of these breaks; if neither of them had happened my app would be sitting about with nothing to do.

So now that I have a number of users I need to decide on my next steps. Some of them are engaging with the app, some are not. Of those that are, only a few are using it regularly, which is what I would term to be real engagement…

Getting user feedback is hard

When I talk to friends in person, a lot of them have ideas on what to add, and change. But only a few people have contacted me from the site. By email. The number one requested feature so far is to break the close coupling with Facebook. Initially I was worried about this, because I see facebook posts as a good way to let people know about the app. I’m only willing to do this because its also IMHO a very useful feature of the app, however it seems that only 110 or so of my visits came from Facebook, so I expect that to be the next thing I do.

From all of this, I have created a checklist of ideas that I want to take forward into my next app.

1. Build something quickly, even if it looks bad
2. Set a launch date in advance. More than anything else, that helped me keep the feature count low
3. Allow some time for tinkering with it, tweaking the design and the UI based on feedback
4. Have some better ideas on how to spread word about the app. Luck won’t happen every time