MissingMethod

I’m a contributing blogger over at Rail Spikes, and my first post is about deploying Rails applications on Amazon’s EC2 service. Go check it out!

R2 says you should!

For fun, and because I wanted to learn something new this weekend, I moved Feedmarker and Snapballot over to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). They’ve been running happily over there for the last three days! Hopefully I’ll have time to write up my experiences making the move a little later; but for now let me just say that for a non-sysadmin like me, it was actually pretty easy. And now I’ve got a nice little EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that I can deploy with one click, should I ever need another server instance.

More on this later…

Hey, check out this interview I did with Peter Cooper of RubyInside:

“Rails allows me to develop and deploy a lot of ideas because it removes barriers from the path. Getting a simple idea to the point where it’s usable in Rails is a matter of hours, so there isn’t a lot of cost/risk in trying things out.”

Hey everyone, Mashable is running a social networking contest, and we’re mentioned as one of the potential candidates in the ‘niche’ category. Check it out:

Ben and I working (feverishly?) on last-minute things for Curbly.com, the DIY Design community for people who love where they live. We’ve already started inviting a few select users and the site is starting to look really good. Watch this space: we’ll let you know when it’s ready.

I came across this doozie today while trolling for interesting design links in Minneapolis. On the AIGA Minnesota homepage, a post announcing a recent site-redesign showed 51 new comments, so I thought I’d take a look at some of the praise.

Um, not quite. Here are some of my favs:

• “I can’t believe that you have now made the jobs password only. That hurts.”
• “BOOOOO! I think the new site is horrible”
• “Bring back the free job postings!!!!”
• “Soon we might have to pay to comment on the website.”
• “I can’t believe it costs $100 to post a job. That is a rip off. What are you thinking by instituting this?”

Well, I wonder what these users would like. Free job listings, perhaps?

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Kathy Sierra has numerous posts about helping the user “kick ass.” It has been helpful for me to run the “kick-ass” filter on every feature I consider for my projects. Invariably, I find myself cutting out features that might be new and fun to develop but don’t actually help regular users kick ass. It’s similar to the idea that “nobody loves your kids like you do” – the more you know your product, the less objective you are about what feature it ought to include.

So, let’s say you’ve gone through your set of features and decided what will actually help the user kick ass, and you’ve cut out the features you slipped in there merely to pique your developer curiousity. Now that you have a list, how do you prioritize? Or better yet, how to you prioritize features from the user’s point of view? If you don’t have a user around, and it’s just you and your buddy working on a social-networking app for cat lovers, just ask yourself this question: “what would I bitch about next?”

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The other day I posted on the difference between researching the future and inventing it, pointing to an article that argued design-types are more likely to user “abductive reasoning” and creative thinking to decide what the future will/should look like, while corporate-types often tend toward research and deductive reasoning.

Here’s an article from Strategy + Business that discusses why managing by facts works. In it, John Lilly, former CEO of Reactivity and current COO of Firefox, talks about how they used to pitch venture capitalists during the dot-com boom:

In a period of 30 weeks, his team generated 30 PowerPoint presentations as “prototypes” for a diverse group of Internet-based startups. Out of these, a combination e-mail and Web browser was chosen as the most promising. Its PowerPoint presentation was fine-tuned and then shown to potential backers. Based primarily on this slide show — there was very little else for the venture capitalists to go on — Reactivity raised more than $100 million for a new company.

But Lilly says that approach wouldn’t work these days: “By and large, venture capitalists only fund Web-based companies that already have proven the ability to attract customer traffic,” he says.

Another case-in-point is Hewlett-Packard’s 2001 acquisition of Compaq, a move many consider to be the cause of HP’s current troubles. The transaction was made without much research of consumer attitudes toward compaq, and the result was a conflict in perception about the merged businesses.

Here’s the take-away:

From our research, we are convinced that when companies base decisions on evidence, they enjoy a competitive advantage. And even when little or no data is available, there are things executives can do that allow them to rely more on evidence and logic and less on guesswork, fear, faith, or hope.

… even hunches, fresh ideas, and inventions should be measured against logical and empirical benchmarks to determine whether they are efficacious ideas or just momentarily exciting thoughts better off abandoned.

Guidelines for an effective evidence-based strategy? First, act on the facts. Second, treat the organization as a prototype (read: be agile!).

Pelle Braendgaard over at Stake Ventures has a really smart, in-depth series of articles on pitfalls to avoid as a small or solo entrepreneur. My favorites:

#3 - The evils of business plans. Bottom line: if your business plan is nothing more than an “unreadable sales document”, don’t waste time on it. Don’t worry about made-up marketing numbers, imaginary user adoption rates, and outlining your first hires. Those things waste time; “they don’t reflect a dynamic, growing business”

#5 - Believe you will succeed but don’t let optimism blind you. Bottom line: Figure out the difference between optimism and realism. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have believe you will prevail in the end. But over-adherence to a particular strategy in the face of facts that show it’s not working will keep you from being flexible enough to correct your course.

Fortunately, my meetings consist of two people quickly debating a problem and usually agreeing on a solution in under five minutes. But for those of you who have to endure long, spiraling meetings where no one seems to be talking about the same thing, Kathy Sierra has a convenient little Cluetrain Bingo card you can bring with you: