Business of Software seems to be really great conference. I have not been there, however the videos of the talks that they post online are very inspiring and informative.

In this section they show 5 short 8-minute presentations on various topics all well suited for people in startups and entrepreneurs.

Justin Goeres: What’s your Tuva?

A talk about what your most important mission in life is. What drives you? Find it and do it!

Karl Treier: 20 Tips on Starting a Business

Some of the tipps:

• what do you want to accomplish (aside from making money)?
• charge real money
• be ready to pivot

Patrick Foley (Microsoft): Confessions of a Wannapreneur

Talk about moving from employment to actually starting a business.

Corey Reid (Freshbooks) - Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Very informative talk with good example what you should look for when hiring people. Look for enthusiasm and problem-solving-abilities.

Tyler Rooney  (Amazon) - Things I Learned the Hard Way at Amazon.com

Great talk on the problems that a software developer faces day-to-day and how to solve them most productively.

I hope you enjoyed the videos. For more, visit the Business of Software blog: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/

Jeff Veen, CEO and successful entrepeneur tells a story of how the team of web startup typekit managed to solve a crucial emergency with their application.

Typekit is a web application that delivers custom fonts to users and partners all over the web.

Lesson 1: Have a clear emergency response protocol

When everything falls apart a clear and structured baby-steps plan on how to get back to normal is crucial to keep everybody calm and productive. Focusing on single issues helps create an overall solution to the problem. Anybody should be able to follow this protocol.

Lesson 2: Be clear on what service you are actually providing

Jeff makes the point that before their almost break down he was not really aware that typekit was actually more than just one service – the one their customers see the most. There were apis and a whole delivery network in place. The latter was not in control of typekit and caused the problem.

Lesson 3: Grow a trusting and collaborative culture

Bad things are going to happen. Growing a culture in your team that enables you to solve these problems in short time is crucial to building a successful web startup.

Last Lesson: Start your meetings 5 minutes past the hour :)

In the following video Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, a design company based in Chicago talks about his experience of moving from a client focused business to a product developing business model.

Lesson 1: Treat Your own Products as Though it Were Client Work

Don’t treat your own products as step childs. Care about them. Put time and effort into them. Stick to deadlines and commitments as you would if they were commissioned by a client.

This will eventually help you move those products forward and ready to launch and earn money with them.

Lesson 2: Learning by Doing and Staying Flexible

What is it your company is currently doing? How can you use this knowledge/assets/technology to pivot to your own product?

Do this step by step and evaluate what you are learning along the way. Pivot as soon the market or technology or your team demands it.

Do not change your business model as a whole in one  step. Pretend to be taking on “new clients” (that are your own products) step by step and only keep them if they grow to be sustainable and valid businesses.

Lesson 3 and Most Importantly: Start Sooner

I highly recommend a product development business – even if you still have revenue that comes from clients. Because it makes you more independent of clients and their needs which often will not align with your ambitions, wishes and visions. And you always can switch back to serving clients in case your financial situation demands it.

This it what we at teamaton are currently doing. We are developing a generalized version of the platform software for camping.info which is called discoverize. Thus we will be able to host multiple platforms and lease them to partners in other industries (such as marinas or hotels). And we are also working on a simple and useful todo management tool for teams and individuals.

And Coudal’s advice is clear and simple: “I should have done it sooner. What are you afraid of? Get Busy!”

[via signal vs. noise]

Yesterday I once again participated in a coding dojo – it’s been a while. These events are organized by the ALT.NET User Group Berlin.

We were 13 people. We formed three groups with one Laptop each. Each group got the same assignment – the tennis kata. It is a pretty simple task, which has to be completed in about an hour and a half with TDD.

What is interesting is not so much to implement the best solution. To me, it is more absorbing to see with what ideas the others in my group approach the problem, and their art and philosophy of coding. It’s always inspiring to see other methods performed live. Solving the problem is then more about finding a common language and agreeing on one solution and, if possible, on one coding style. It’s challenging to persuade the others that the approach one has in mind is a good one. The setting of four people per one computer enforces cooperation – a good skill to hone.

I like the coding dojos, and will try to participate again in the next one. Landau Medien was fine host – they provided their conference room and sponsored soft drinks, beer and pizza. Thanks also to Jan and Mike for organizing.

When you are building web apps as we are you certainly have heard of Jason Fried. 37signals co-founder and bootstrapped startups guru is always keen on sharing advice on how 37signals has become one of the most profitable web startups.

In an interesting article on inc he talks about making money, charging your clients, finding the right price and the difference between doing your job and making your job a business.

Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn tells his story of starting his own business of making knifes. Well shot video from the series “Made By Hand”.

Stumbling into Your Passion – or Finding it

First interesting turn in the story is the way Joel moves away from considering himself a writer. Take a timeout and most and formost do stuff. Experiment. And eventually you are going to stumble or get pushed into something that really suits you, that you can and want and are passionate about.

Getting Real Feedback from Real People

One thing that reminded me a lot when I switched from studying to product design and eventually user experience design, is the fact that your work, your product is used by someone, helps them and if you did a good job is appreciated by them.

Same thing here: Making knifes for people to use them and thus give something to a community, become part of that community is always a very strong motivator and very likely to make you like your work.

Putting in the Hours, the Sweat, the Blood

Once you found a profession that suits you, that fulfills you, that makes you happy working in it, you still have to turn it into a business that allows you to keep doing it. And to start earning money from your passion means, you have to become very good at it. “So good they can’t ignore you” as Steve Martin says.

There is no shortcut, no easy way to become competent. As Joel puts it: “Buckets of sweat and blood and work to get there.”

Focus on the Value of Your Work

Figure out what value you create and why your customers care about your product.

Stick to this value and work hard to maintain it. In our case at teamaton it is delivering a software product that helps our users to get something done and by doing so delivering a great and enjoyable user experience. In Joels case it is delivering quality by making everything by hand.

That is why I like these stories of how passionate and competent people got to do what they are doing. It is a great source of inspiration and shows me whether I am on the right track.

Roger McNamee is the Co-Founder of Elevation partners and has succefully invested in facebook.

In this talk he speaks about his perspective on future markets, possibilities and investment strategies.

Some of his points include:

• google is loosing in the index search market: thanks to mobile, facebook, yelp
• html5 makes real creativity on the web possible – engagement is possible on every site
• get an ipad! it is the new ui
• architectual shift: cloud plus screen
• don’t invest in social – it is a feature

[via businessinsider.com]

Peldi who created the very popular and obviously profitable wireframing tool balsamiq talks about his experience of starting your own software company. Some interesting insights into fears, challenges and solutions for startups and software creators.

Here is the video:

Check out the transcript over at the business of software blog.

The well known venture capitalist and former apple employe Guy Kawasaki has published an interesting list on what he has learned from Steve Jobs.

My favourite is: “Changing Your Mind is a Sign of Intelligence”. In my experience being able to adapt either to market development or social situations fast and intuitively is one of the major challenges when working in such a fast-paced business as the internet. No matter what you are doing, within less than 12 month you are doing something almost completely different.

But there are also some other nice take-aways.

Check out the whole post at Guys blog.

I have been again to the .NET Open Space in Leipzig. This time with my colleague Oliver.

I have written a Review last year. I want to take the opportunity to write what has changed in teamaton since then:

• We took a few steps towards a more agile development. We think these were steps in the right directions :). Since we started with two new projects, we could practice different approaches. I still haven’t looked closed at Scrum and XP.
• We implemented a good GIT workflow, even without the git flow software.
• We are by far more disciplined when testing – even though there is still room for improvement. Mark has automated many of our Selenium tests. We work much more often according to TDD. With our last project we started with SpecFlow, that is with behavior driven development.

Back to the Open Space of this year. I liked it. It was refreshing to see so many developer from the .NET, and talk to them. The first day was not as interesting regarding the sessions as the second day. The atmosphere was good – there were more than 150 people, many from Berlin, where our office is. Everyone could kegel, get a massage, and participate at different lotteries.

Here are a few topics, where I joined the discussions.

Message Queues (RabbitMQ)

I haven’t thought about message queues a lot. Yet, we do have an area of application for those: Sending emails from within a web application.

Why should one use MQs?

• separated systems – therefore a higher reliability of the different components
• scalability with all the pros which come along
• no waiting on feedback – important for long actions
• the queue is persistable – does not get lost in case of a crash

How does it work? One or more publishers push messages into a queue. There are one or more subscribers listening to the queue, and work off the messages. Publishers can push different tasks to different queues, which then are listened to by different subscribers. One can imagine a system of prioritization with this feature.

Tools: We discussed a small example with RabbitMQ (und EasyNetQ). We talked about the differences to MSMQ und NServericeBus. As it seems, RabbitMQ is more powerful (applicable to different platforms), but MSMQ is easier to understand for beginners.

Agile Development

First we discussed the division between ProductOwner and ScrumMaster. Then we talked about how detailed UserStories should be written out, and who should create them. All in all we concluded that UserStories should first be roughly described by the ProductOwner and then refined with the help of a developer while talking about the problem at hand.

As a takeaway I will try to promote more feedback meetings or retrospectives in our firm. We should compare more often our expectations and the reality and impediments. Many other firms organize estimation meetings, where they also define acceptance criteria – maybe we should do something like that, too. I want to look into Scrum, even though we are not enough people for this process, but there may be ideas we can apply to our little firm.

CQRS

There were a few sessions to CQRS, because it was new to many of us, and very interesting. Command-Query Responsibility Segragation is an architecture pattern, has many different aspects which for themselves are already patterns. It is also found under the name of CQS (Command-query separation).

It is (for me) a totally different approach at saving data and retrieving it. There is much emphasis on the thought process and the domain model. The patterns starts with the user and his/her actions, not with data objects. These actions are translated into commands, which are processed and generate events. These events are basically incremental steps to changing the state of the database. They are saved in an append-only database, so they do not get lost. These events can then be used to update denormalized databases where the views are saved. That way you can get fast access to the data you want to display to the user. (See also the CQRS-Website from Gregory Young with a long introductory video, and an article byMartin Fowler.)

We looked at a small Example (quellcode), where you can see that it does not take much to apply this pattern

I hope that we at teamaton will try this architectural pattern out on a new coming project. I like it a lot, especially the focus from the beginning on a sophisticated domain structure.

At last a few smaller things I ran into at the Open Space:

• As a developer you often come to point where you ask yourself: Should I use existing software or program it myself? We should try to estimate the costs without a bias towards self-development. We should try to analyze the existing software more thoroughly.
• I would like to learn more about REST and RESTful web-services.
• I will read through the articles on heise online “Clean Code Development in Brownfield-Projekten”: http://www.heise.de/developer/artikel/Clean-Code-Developer-in-Brownfield-Projekten-855114.html
• If you start with a Brownfield-Project, you first should write acceptance tests.
• I was not at the session about Software Craftsmanship, but I will look into this site: http://groupspaces.com/softwerkskammer.

Next year will be again a .NET Open Space in Leipzig: 20th and 21st of October 2012. Thanks for the Organization!