Categories
Google? Doh! iphone

Throw away the iPhone? or throw away Gmail? Decisions, decisions…

For the past week, my iPhone’s have been unable to use Gmail. After approximately 4 hours, gmail locks you out of IMAP completely, unless/until you force-kill Apple’s mail client. The problem is … if you force-kill the client, you lose all emails you wrote, and you lose all emails you filed into IMAP folders (Apple’s client refuses to save state – it requires the server to do it).

Nothing has changed on the phones – and Google has been putting up irritating “stop using gmail, use the new gmail” ads for the same period of time – so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that someone at Google changed something on the IMAP protocol that makes it no longer work correctly with iPhone.

I just had to write the same email for the second time, and re-file 50+ emails for the third time – and I’m giving up. You just can’t use gmail on an iOS 4 iPhone right now (I’m guessing that iOS 5 works OK, or there’d be an internet rage fest going on.

So. What to do. Dump the iPhone (switch to Android as my main phone, perhaps?)?

Or decide that enough’s enough, gmail is just too damn annoying these days (e.g. the 3 week period earlier this year where “reply all” was disabled on my gmail account) … I’ve heard there’s an email-for-life system called … hotmail?

Hmm…

Categories
entrepreneurship facebook recruiting startup advice web 2.0

New startup, aiming for acquisition by Facebook

Please email me (adam at red-glasses.com) if you have skills / interest in the following:

  1. Mass market (i.e. everyone + their mom) telling stories
  2. javascript frameworks for complex visual 2D stuff (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, etc)
  3. Visual manipulation of large 2D images on mobile (especially iPhone)

NB: we have no funding yet, just an idea. This is a scatter-gun first approach – if things go well, there will be another call for people in 2-4 months time.

Categories
games design

GDC 2012 Rejection

Against my own advice, I submitted an eleventh hour proposal for the 2012 GDC. I’ve fallen in love with San Francisco, but I’m in two minds about going next year, it seems to have too much of E3 about it. The simple beauty of a conference for games people, about games, feels washed out and faded away.

“While we can’t comment on why individual submissions were declined due to the high volume of submissions received, be aware that it can often be due to multiple reasons — many of which have nothing to do with the professionalism or quality of the talk proposed.”

The more time I spend around inspirational people, the more I realise that it is never acceptable to refuse reasons for a decision. Usually, the reasons are things you’d rather not hear – criticisms too close to the bone, complaints too painful but fair – but they are things you need to hear anyway, to have a decent chance of moving forwards as a person.

CMP / Think Services is in the unenviable position that they own the only global event that speaks for mankind’s total relationship with computer games. I’m sure it seemed like a good commercial play at the time – but how fair is it that they now must shoulder the total face-time of every step forwards in the art and science of game development? Tough crowd, if you ask me.

Or is there some other (non judgemental) forum for face-to-face game design that I’ve missed?

Categories
bitching facebook

Fight the Guardian’s and The Independent’s spam

On Facebook.com front page:

“Dave Stone and Mike Merren recently read articles.”

…so I click on one of them. Lo and behold, instead of getting an article, I get The Independent app trying to force me to install it.

Force. Yes, force – there is no option to “view the article”, the only option is “install this app or cancel”.

Lots of people complaining about this recently, but there’s really only two things to do:

  1. Shame the newspaper by tweeting them
  2. Report them to Facebook for abuse

Tweet them to let them know what you think

@Guardian and @TheIndyNews

Report to Facebook

Yes, I know Facebook is behind this in the first place, but if you don’t bug them about it, they’re less likely to care:

…and you might as well let the developers know how pissed you are – directly – since Facebook gives you this option:

Categories
Web 0.1

Linkedin now blocking iPhones

If you follow links in linkedin emails today, from an iPhone, you get kicked off the linkedin.com site, and every page redirects to:

Https://touch.www.linkedin.com

Even if you type in the front page URL directly, you are *not allowed* to visit the website.

Classy.

Categories
android computer games dev-process games design programming

Prototyping: Chess Quest v0.4

(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here)

Major changes:

  1. Enemies have health, and can be killed by touching them
  2. Performance is another 30% faster (should be running OK on most phones now?)
  3. Enemies have a direction indicator (not necessary right now, but it’ll become important in a later version…)

Download link

Chess Quest-0.4.0

Categories
agile games design programming

16 KB Game Competition (winter 2011) – Java

http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/lwjgl16k/25093/view.html

“the LWJGL16k competition starts right here, right now.” – Cas

The rules

First deadline: 25th November 2011
First task: get a black screen running using LWJGL

“you’ve got 7 days. All I’m looking for at this stage from you is a blank window opening up and maybe a rotating square or whatever. Of course complete games are even more welcome but the idea is to get something shipped.”

Well, what are you waiting for?

If you’ve got Eclipse installed, all you need do is download the LWJGL library, copy/paste the 50-line minimal project from the Wiki, and submit your entry!

(I believe Cas is onto a good thing here … force people to realise how easy it is to make a game if you focus on small-but-visible steps done *quickly* – No more procrastination!)

Categories
amusing Web 0.1

Eventbrite: please un-break your login page

And repeat after me:

“novice web developers should NOT override the Enter key on the keyboard”

(autocomplete fails – when you hit enter to accept browser-autocomplete, the idiotic untested, badly-written javascript kicks in and deletes the form data)

Categories
computer games funny

Kongregate: Level = 47

That’s one higher than Jim Greer.

Finally.

Categories
fixing your desktop PHP programming

Fixing Suffusion: List posts from a single WordPress category

UPDATE: So … it seems Suffusion has (buried deep inside the config) a way of displaying category pages with a higher-level workaround to the WP “missing feature”. Although so far I can’t find a way to set the settings on individual pages (which is what you generally need). So, I’ll leave this post up – it’s a good starting point for customizing Suffusion’s page-of-pages (which is also, it seems, how you would customize its Category pages.

Just to be clear, this is not a bug in Suffision, although it’s an oversight and I hope it’ll be included in a future version. The core problem is in WordPress: people have been requesting/expecting this feature for the past 5+ years, it’s pretty basic, but for now the WP folks haven’t added it.

Problem: List all the posts in a single category

This is VERY frequently requested by WP users: you want to have a Page on your site which lists the posts that are in a single Category.

WP has a very low-level way of doing this – which is very error-prone, hard to maintain (it’s hard-coded to database ID’s!), and requires you to break every single theme you own. Every time the theme is updated, you have to manually re-implement the fix!

Fortunately, there’s a minimal workaround (which is documented in the WP docs now (scroll to bottom)) which still (!) requires some theme editing.

Fortunately, Suffusion already has most of this workaround implemented, so we can make the fix without screwing around with the theme so much. The source code in Suffusion is almost identical to the sample provided by WP – but unfortunately it’s missing a key part. In Suffusion, you CAN list posts on a Page, but you CANNOT filter those posts by category.

Solution: Combine WP’s source with Suffusion, with a bit of safety improvement

So, edit the file “posts.php”, titled (in Suffusion): “Page of Posts”.

Where it has these lines:

$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);

…instead copy/paste the following:

$category_exclusive = get_post_meta($posts[0]->ID, 'category', true );

if( $category_exclusive )
{
$cat = get_cat_ID($category_exclusive);
$args = array(
	'category__in' => array( $cat ),
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}
else
{
$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}

Usage

As per WP’s official suggestion … if you want a page to filter by category:

  1. Edit the page
  2. Select the “Page of Posts” template (this is Suffusion specific; in other themes, it might not exist)
  3. Add a “custom field” (scroll down on the edit screen), called “category”, with a value of the NAME of the category you want to be included

Explanation

One major thing here: We are being SAFE and non-destructive to the Suffusion theme.

Critically important is that we ONLY do a “filter by category” if the Page itself requests it. WP’s sample code does NOT have this protection (which is why the code above is slightly different).

This means that the rest of Suffusion (which doesn’t know about our new feature) is unaffected, and works as normal

Categories
android devdiary games design

Prototyping: Chess Quest v0.3

(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here)

Three major changes:

  1. You have a health bar, and can die
  2. The trackball is now supported for movement
  3. Performance is literally 1.5x – 2x faster

Download link

Chess Quest-0.3.3

So, a friend of mine tried it out today, and he couldn’t move around at all – something wrong with his HTC Desire (even though I’ve been testing on near-identical phone, for some reason his phone was losing the input gestures). This evening I did some improvements and fixes until it began to work “tolerably” on his phone – and I threw in some new small features too.

It’s still test stuff – not indicative of the final gameplay, but I’m trying out different basic ways of achieveing the stuff I want to achieve in the later versions.

Overview of what’s changed

  • You have a very basic HUD
  • There’s a couple of coloured powerups scattered around – red restores health, green increases maximum health permanently
  • Enemies actually kill you now, every moment you’re touched by one, your health drains continuously
  • You can choose different levels at the start – I included one of the early test levels that was easy for me to upgrade with recent changes. I’ve got another one I can probably add quickly later (one which generates 100% random mazes each time you play)
  • The ultra-simple EntitySystem I’m using was running too slow. There’s no simple fix I can see – the ES really needs to be written for performance, if I want it to be high performance – but I was able to do a 10-lines-of-code workaround that took the worst piece of bad performance in my game and made it literally 5 times faster. That’s good enough for now!
  • Input system has changed *again* – the Android OS has poor input management, a bit buggy, with an inconsistent programming API, which *also* runs differently on different phones – so I keep trying to do as little work on this as possible. The Android OS is desperately trying to prevent me from doing any prototyping at all – it’s begging for me to write hundreds of lines of code to make up for Google’s inattention there – but if I do that, I will lose all the time I would have spent doing game design and dev, and the whole project will be a failure. So, yet again, I’m putting on a band-aid and dodging the rest for now. But … at least now you can use trackball instead of / in addition to swiping on the touchscreen
  • There’s an FPS counter on the screen
Categories
advocacy programming social networking startup advice

StackOverflow: “Communal” development at its best

Someone just wrote this comment on one of my StackOverflow answers:

Fundamentally, this question/answer pair is saying:

“Apple: one of your non-programming managers made a stupid mistake in one of your core tools, one used every day by hundreds of thousands of people; since you won’t fix it, here’s a (tricky) workaround that anyone can use”

Apple “doesn’t do” anything open, doesn’t do community support, or community development – you’re not even allowed to know if you’re the first person to report a bug, or the millionth.

But if they did, just imagine how much better their tools would be, and how much more productive the iOS developer community would be…

Categories
android devdiary games design programming

Prototyping: Chess Quest v0.2

(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here)

A couple more hours work, a few more changes:

Overview of what’s changed

  • Obvious from the screenshot: added alternating black/white background tiles. I want it to feel like the traditional chessboard has become the “floors” of the dungeons/towers you’re exploring
  • Major fixes for collision detection: player and enemies now do pixel-precise collisions (previously, if e.g. a piece moved 5 pixels per tick, it would move either 0 pixels (if 5 would collide) or 5. Now it moves “as many pixels as it can before the collision happens”)
  • Major upgrade to renderering: instead of just “render everything, in random order” it now sorts all sprites once per frame. Each sprint is instantiated with a sort-layer; things in the same layer are rendered in random order, but before all things in the next layer
  • Minor tweaks to movement: not happy with this, but I found the “never stops moving” annoying. Now I find the “stops too easily” annoying.
  • Various experiments with zoom level – I tried 20px, 32px, 64px and 100px (very zoomed in!). I found 32 px was working nicest on the Nexus 1, so I’ve stuck with that for now. In a future build, I’ll probably bring back the option to switch to a zoom level of your choice.
  • Added Flurry: I’ve never done this with a prototype before, but then I’ve never prototyped in public :). I’ve added Flurry just so I can keep track of how many people are running the prototype; as I add to the prototype, I’ll start adding in-app feedback options, so you can effectively “vote” on things you like/dislike, and I’ll use Flurry to graph it all automatically.

Download link for this version

Version 0.2

Categories
android computer games devdiary games design

Game prototype: Chess Quest

Last weekend, I was playing around with some ideas for a Chess / RPG mashup. I did some prototyping with Android (because iPhone apps can’t be shared, and Java is much faster to debug than ObjC).

If you’ve got an Android phone, try this, and let me know if it runs:

There’s not much you can do – touch and drag on the screen to move up/down/left/right (you’re the Rook – hence no diagonal moves). Bishops and pawns wander around randomly, pawns slower than bishops.

UPDATED: if you rotate the screen sideways, it’ll randomly pick a different size / zoom level. There’s four sizes, from 20×20 squares up to 100×100 squares. Player moves at different speeds based on the size too.

I wanted to make it a dungeon-exploration style, but with a Chess theme – and (like in chess) each time you complete a dungeon (kill the boss) you get to “pawn” and switch your character to the chess piece you killed.

i.e. first boss would be the Rook, second the Bishop, third the Knight, etc.

…but I’m not sure I’ll stick with that. If I get some more time this weekend, I’ll prototype a bit more.

NB: the APK above might run slow – I’m interested if it looks jerky / doesn’t work on your phone. It runs fine on an old Nexus One.

Categories
android facebook programming project management social networking startup advice web 2.0

Is Google’s mistaken belief in the power of Product killing them?

Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant is not so much a rant as a sign of someone fighting an inappropriate culture. We saw stuff like this a lot at NCsoft when people were trying to turn around the $100 million clusterf*ck that created hundreds of redundancies all the way to director level.

It’s a great article, but a couple of the key points resonated with my own experience of Google UK’s hiring practices a couple of years ago. There was clearly a lot wrong with the internal culture, but as an outsider I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Here’s the crux of Steve’s post (but seriously – read the whole thing, it’s rich and meaty):

That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of them. Stubby’s great, but it’s like parts when you need a car.

…and finally, reading that, it clicked for me what I saw that was so wrong:

Google has forgotten what a Product is

“It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products.”

That pair of sentences, back to back, is the problem: people outside Google would put the word “except” in between. Googlers put the word “because” in between. Google’s cultural definition of Product has got lost and perverted somewhere along the way, and now looks and smells like the real thing but is – to the rest of the world – a fake. Except Google – internally – can’t see this.

Every Googler I talked to worshipped at the altar of Product-as-King; three quarters of them would then – even in the same sentence – admit that they hated Product, didn’t believe in it, and felt it was a waste of time — “get out of my face with your product BS, and let me write beautiful code in my Ivory Towers, and leave me alone”.

They were smart people; they never said this explicitly (although one came very close – and you could see the moment when he had the thought: “oh crap; if anyone else hears I said that…”, then backtracked very hastily) – instead they frequently said mutually conflicting things, and dressed them up in enough abstractions that you could pretend that they weren’t conflicting. They were very good at it – I could tell there was a crack, but I couldn’t work out where the fault-line lay.

Google’s illusions of Product

As Steve puts it later on:

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Product. Platform. Since when have those been mutually exclusive? Not in this Millennium, I believe…

And even when Google gets over their hatred of Platform, even with something as simple as the pixels that their apps put on screen, they’ve jumped the shark:

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I’m a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We’re not arrogant, by and large.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn’t let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I’m actually going blind. For real. I’ve been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they’re quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you’re blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.

It’s not just them. It’s everyone.

Any genuine Product person would run screaming from that situation – there’s nothing salvageable. It’s like someone coming to you with their design for a chocolate teapot: “Once you’ve had your tea, you can have a tasty chocolate treat too!”, leaving you wondering: where do I even start with trying to explain to this person what they’re missing?

Categories
computer games facebook

D&D on Facebook

Step 1

follow link

Step 2

app demands your date of birth, for no reason (one day … Facebook will stop being so ridiculous about this, and give the user power, rather than the advertisers. One day…)

Step 3

app fails to install (having taken your private data)

Step 4: tell them what to do with it

Bye-bye!

Categories
advocacy entrepreneurship startup advice

The FAILtrepreneur?

Here’s a new term: The FAILtrepreneur


FAILtrepreneur

def: someone who tries to be an Entrepreneur, and takes advantage of lots of things intended to “help” them be a success, but somehow finds each “help” pushes them further and further into mediocrity and the failure of their business. Then they go work for a management consultancy; they have great stories to tell about their jolly jaunty time playing at being an Entrepreneur

What “business-people”, consultants, politicians etc tend to think Entrepeneurs need

Time and again, these people think they’re “helping”. They never stop to think about what their assumptions say about themselves – and how little they say about Entrepreneurs.

Typically, they believe that startup-founders-to-be need:

  1. An office – “rent is too expensive for poor people!”
  2. Tax breaks – “my biggest financial worry each year is my personal tax bill. And it would be the same if I started a new company. I’d get taxed on my £500k profits straight away, after taking all that risk! That’s why I don’t do it. Other people must feel the same!”
  3. Income guarantees – “startups are risky – you can spend years running a startup, and not be able to contribute to your mortgage and your pension. No-one would dare skimp their Mortgage and Pension!”
  4. Opportunity – “I always feel I could have done more in this world, if only I’d been running my own company. Look at how successful I’ve been, working for others – and imagine what I’d have achieved with my intelligence/contacts/business skills if I’d been running the show!”
  5. Contacts – “I hate it when startups talk to me, they’re useless to my career, and they’re so likely to fail they’ll probably make me look bad when they blow all our money. I would never trust them / sign a deal with them. So it must be really hard for them to talk to / meet other companies, potential partners and investors!”
  6. Confidence – “To be honest, I’m terrified of starting a company – God! it must be so awful! – if it fails, it’ll all be my fault, and everyone will finally realise what a talentless hack I am!”

What DOESN’T an Entrepreneur want?

The last thing that Entrepreneurs need – the very last thing – is to be given handouts or to be patronized.

Being an Entrepreneur is *all about* starting from an inferior position and not just out-doing everyone else, but positively eclipsing them.

The idea that they need “a leg up” or “handouts” is laughable – all it does is re-enforce the qualities and expectations that the Entrepreneur needs to avoid.

What does an Entrepreneur really need?

Resource; specifically: whatever resource they cannot manufacture for themselves, out of thin air.

Ultimately, a great Entrepreneur is someone who sees opportunities, leaps on them, knocks them to the ground, and exploits the heck out of them.

If they can do that, normally they can magic-up whatever else they need. But there’s often a couple of needs that prove slightly too overwhelming:

  1. Time – a lot of the time, an Entrepreneur misjudges an opportunity. Given time, they can usually bend it into a new opportunity – or adjust their own spending to fit the potential profit. Often, they run out of time before they finish that.
  2. Cash – “running out of cash before our profit comes in” is really the only thing that kills startups
  3. Staff – cash often kills startups because the first thing you lose is your staff. Everything else is negotiable (deadlines, suppliers, tax, creditors, etc) – but people need money to live, and you can’t negotiate with “hunger” or “I have to pay my rent”.

Everything else is fluff:

  1. Office space – have you ever heard of a startup that failed because “we didn’t have an office”? Of course not – that would be stunningly pathetic – like saying: “we failed because my pen ran out of ink, so I could never sign any more contracts. Ever.”
  2. Tax – to a startup founder, their concept of “success” is making so much money that they’ll be *proudly* paying $1 million / year in tax – and not sweating it. People who fail … never earn enough to pay tax in the first place (something many rich people forget is possible). In the end, it’s only the people in corporate jobs that worry about tax…
  3. Income guarantees – to say to a startup founder that they need something to offset lost income is to say: “I believe you will fail”. If you’re building a multi-million-dollar company of which you own – at minimum – 50% of the company, you really couldnt’ care less about “salary”. You’ll be a multi-millionaire just from your shares (and not a paper one: a real one. Because you’re one of the few people who will be legally able to sell them)
  4. Opportunity – what? Do you even know what “entrepreneur” means?
  5. Contacts – every (legal) business needs to sell something. Selling requires finding people and persuading them to give you money that is MORE than the cost of the thing you’re giving them. If you’re able to do that … how could “contacts” ever be a challenge for you? If you’re NOT able to do that … you are guaranteed to fail anyway
  6. Confidence – an Entrepreneur is confident almost by definition – you don’t become a fledling Entrepreneur until the day you leave behind your un-confidence. If you don’t have a vision, and self-belief, you haven’t even started yet.

Concrete suggestions for helping Entrepreneurs

1. Give salary guarantees to the employees, not the founders

2. Cash (but here be dragons: so many ways to do this badly, so few to do it well!)

(this would need a series of posts just to summarise the successes and failures to date – and I believe the professional investors of this world are doing a pretty good job already via the VC blogs, the Angel blogs, VentureHacks, etc)

3. Give cash to failed startups who can explain how they’re salvaging their failure

Professional investors won’t touch a small failed business with a bargepole (usually).

Not because there’s no profit there – there manifestly IS profit there – but because the potential upside has been given a glass ceiling, and they’re not interested in “small but steady profit”.

Fair enough; but that leaves a gulf where someone else could step in. If the businesses that failed are big enough, then professional investors are happy to be involved – the money becomes enough to excite them. It’s when they’re small that there’s a black hole.

Categories
agile programming project management

Scrum: I added a feature to my game, but it’s 5% broken

With Scrum, you’re constantly focussing on:

How does the application look / work for the user *right now*?

…to the extent that you care more about “does this feature work for the user?” than “is the code/art/architecture for this feature ideal?”.

“It’s not done” … “but it looks done!”

We regularly get situations where a feature *appears* to work, to a casual observer – but on deeper inspection, it’s clearly broken in one or more significant ways. Sometimes, the “broken” parts are so obscure that you’d need help to even find them. Other times, they’re obvious if you try to to use the feature more than just once or twice.

In Scrum terms, it’s pretty clear what’s gone wrong: the Product Owner didn’t describe the feature clearly enough (they implicitly included functionality they didn’t really care about, … or they described it too vaguely to be implemented well).

Scrum’s in-built check/balance against that is the Team. The developer who adopted the task should have rejected it during the Planning meeting, should have insisted on a clearer User Story (or a more explicit feature description).

But in the real world, this stuff happens. Leaving the issue: What do you do next?

One technique: Divide and Conquer

Here’s an approach I’ve been experimenting with recently.

When it happens, you split the feature description in half, re-defining one half as the part which is done + working, and the other half as the part which isn’t working. Or into 3, 4, etc – if there’s multiple “player visible” ways in which it’s not working.

This seems to work pretty well – it lets us independently prioritise “the bit we’ve already got (hence: zero extra dev cost)” and “the hard stuff that’s not working”. And quite often, we end up redesigning some other part in a way that makes the broken edge-cases no longer exist – so we never need to fix them.

…but I’m still experimenting with it. I’m sure we could do our Planning meetings better – both from the PO side (more detailed descriptions, more PO planning) and/or from the developer side (more questioning, demands for more detail).

Categories
startup advice

(Link) Sales technique for startups

Tips to Help you Think About Sales at Your Startup

We covered much ground. The video link is here and quick time-coded show notes at the end of the post in case you want to jump ahead to just one section. But the ground we covered was awesome for anybody wanting to know more about sales.

1. When & Whom should you hire?
2. How much to compensate them?
3. How do you get access to customers?
4. What is your sales process?
5. Telesales versus field sales?
6. What tools do you use?

Categories
entrepreneurship startup advice

Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me

“Starting work without a contract is like a putting a condom on after finding out you got someone pregnant”

For this and other great pieces of advice on life as a services company, trying to get paid, watch this great talk from Mike Monteiro:

http://www.wikio.com/video/mike-monteiro-ck-pay-5196884