I discovered one of our client’s company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they’d just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they’ve found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn’t come across before2 – only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won’t work if everyone does it but it’s another interesting way to differentiate.
One of the challenging practices in XP is daily deployment – it requires your development team to have a very low defect rate and completely automated build and deployment tools. In an off the shelf software scenario it has the additional challenge that you can’t actually get your customers to upgrade every day.
At Ephox we’ve adhered to this practice pretty well in the past by automatically deploying builds to all our internal systems, including our corporate wiki, website CMS and even this blog. Of course, that’s still just a small subset of the kind of environments that we’re actually used in and it’s not actually getting out to real customers. To take the next logical step, we need to make those builds available to any customers who feel like checking out what’s new – maybe not every day, but between all our customers hopefully regularly enough to give us good feedback.
It’s been interesting watching the blog adoption cycle here at Ephox. For a long time I think I was the only person actively blogging, and just from the positive effects of blogging that I’d experienced other people got interested. Our CEO was pressured into getting back into blogging again1, the engineering team started up an internal blog to share some of the cool stuff we found which never really took off and then the CEO started an internal blog2 which has helped the rest of the company get more of a grip on where he’s going. Andy started a blog and we had a couple of hires who had blogs lying dormant that they were then pressured into getting back into and suddenly there was a critical mass of people blogging – enough to have a conversation between us on the blogs.
Two very interesting things I’ve learnt today:
Apparently Andy discovered him within a few hours. By the time I got back to reading feeds this morning both he and Brett had ousted him. Of course, I’ve now added him to Planet Ephox.
I’ve been in our San Mateo office the past week working with the sales and marketing folk which has been great, but also challenging and often frustrating. The challenge is in getting a grip on my new job as product manager, the frustrating from the initial objections we often get from clients as they try and guess what the reaction will be from their users instead of actually finding out. It’s fair enough, that’s all they have to go on but it’s frustrating to have to try and share the experiences that we’ve seen with users giving our software rave reviews. It’s also frustrating to hear negative things about software you’ve written – I always get so attached.
While most of the Ephox folk use EditLive! to edit their blog entries, there are some poor saps who are using a blog hosting service and can’t (we’ve got some interns working on a standalone blog editor with EditLive!, but that’ll take a while yet). This morning Antony learnt the value of a great editor the hard way when he copied and pasted from Microsoft Word into Typepad’s default editor:
There was an interesting panel discussion at JavaOne today about the open sourcing of Java. The panel was made up of folks developing open source JVMs and a representative from Sun. Compatibility is obviously a common theme to these discussions and there were a number of mentions to just how bug for bug compatible the alternative JVMs are trying to be. It occurs to me though that if all the implementations wind up behaving in precisely the same way, there’s not really any point to having multiple implementations. Yes multiple licenses are nice for particular niches but for the average Java developer, what’s the benefit?
One of our board members left a comment on Brett’s blog this morning and I love the way it meshes with my thinking that employee blogs is a crucial tool for senior management to keep up with the directions, understanding and thoughts of the rank and file:
Well, my friend I gotta say that whilst reading board papers a link to a blog is a welcome relief. I get the feedback I crave and welcome and also get a general sense of what is on the minds of your team.
I’m sitting here in Auckland airport transitioning through to San Francisco and there’s an interesting synergy to the stuff that’s coming through. First of all, I see that my rash of Twitter subscriptions (my twitter page) and my mentioning twitter in my last post has caused a few people to add me to Twitter and check out my blog.
In case people are wondering, there was a major failure at our hosting provider which is causing down time. Both this server and the server that hosts the Ephox release blog, LiveWorks!, people.ephox.com and the internal Ephox wiki and JIRA installations have been affected. While (obviously) this site is back up, the Ephox sites didn’t fair so well and are still down.
I’ve noticed something I’ve been doing with some consistency lately – when I come across a product that I have some interest in, but can’t or don’t want to start using straight away, I try to add the product page to my RSS feeds. With the proliferation of RSS support in browsers these days it seems to me that every product page should include a link tag pointing to the product updates feed. Ephox doesn’t currently do this, but its something that we should fix pretty quickly to help people find the Releases Blog and stay up to date with all the latest features and fixes.
As of next week I’ll officially be a product manager instead of an engineer. I’ll no longer be spending my days coding and for our core products I won’t be allowed to make changes to them. I will however be doing a bunch of prototypes and smaller integrations of our products etc so it’s still a hands on role.