Nitobi/PhoneGapA serious look at serious business.

coincidence?

a meme is born

follow along...

@andrecharland@brianleroux

@nitobi@phonegap

2007-ish

Nitobi moving from products to services.

two choices

specialization or agnosticism

specialize

Know one thing well.

agnostic

‣ generalized devs (tricky to do)‣ hire specialists (expensive to do)

pragmatic

Be of the web.

detractors of web techare an endangered species

Tanner Glass leaves them be.

web tech stack

• the new frontline for browser wars is js engine execution

• this leading to server impls like NodeJS

• also seeing huge grfx perf improvements for things like WebGL

Ruby on Rails?

how we do

• billable; hourly --- NO FIXED BIDS EVAR

• track our time to the minute

• estimates are in the spirit of literal meaning of the word

• iterate; weekly or daily builds

crucial factors

• revision control

• unit tests

• issue tracking

• automated daily/weekly builds

non technical factors

• UX and IxD own the product

• Ship a min viable product

• YAGNI

Ship EARLY

• if a client wants it in a month see what can be launched in two weeks

• long hours are detrimental to success: CUT SCOPE

Our office is mobile

• basecamp to keep clients honest

• git and github for issues, rcs, collab

• harvest/coopapp for time tracking

• google docs for other artifacts

we’ll throw out all those tools if a client has an existing system in place

key to agnosticism

Stay on top of new tech. Listen to the devs.

2008

mobile web trending

time to build our acumen

• @davejohnson started hacking his BlackBerry

• @infil00p ordered himeself a G1

• rest of us coveted our man jewellery iPhones

http://blogs.nitobi.com/brock/2008/08/07/unofficial-announcement-of-phonegap/

Aug 7, 2008

byproduct simple rules

1. find a tough problem

2. *attempting* to solve it is more than anyone else is doing

3. you have just created value

4. sometimes you can turn value into money

new problems

• now our business is 75% services

• those services were all over the map but none where in mobile

continued to build the story and acumen

• 20% time hacking

• related passion projects

• informed our clients of our mobile war stories

evolution

• phonegap/android came a month later

• phonegap/blackberry a month after that

• we now support:

• ios, android, bb, symbian, webos, bada

• soon: meego, wp7

solve problem when you have them.

• git and github is fantastic. really you should be using it. (until you shouldn’t)

• added a wiki when we needed docs

• added a mailing list when we needed to support ppl using the software

• formal docs came last year

licensing

• MIT/BSD

• Apache

growing up

• taking outside contributers

• having a formal release schedule

• planning our future battles

two types of tech problems

• science

• big ball of mud

science

• distributed map/reduce

• mapping the human genome

• putting a gyroscope into orbit in one shot on a multibillion dollar budget

big ball of mud

• mvc framework for language X

• unit test frameworks for language X

• dom library

• any impedance mismatch, really

take away

• tech deprecates: you do not have to

• foster learning

• use devs wisely; ask them about passion projects

YOUR tech deprecates

• maintenance is not a chore

• grand rewrites are paths to failure

• you need advocates that are customers

marketing

• not free but damn cheap

• speak at confs

• give away as much IP as possible

• identify byproducts of value and champion

marketing cont..

• blogs last forever: urls

• tweets connect ppl

• 3 min shitty screencast > polished docs

dev happyness

• devs create value writing code

• do everything you can to maximize that time inc 20% time

• NO OVERTIME.

• free them of noise, meetings, etc

• give them the best tools, confs, etc

• team w/ a rad UX / IxD person

dev happyness 2

• don’t hire ‘rockstars’: create them

• foster DISPASSIONATE devs

• critical thinking > marketing dept zealotry

• eradicate attachment to anything: ALL TECH DEPRECATES

• have fun with it.

new direction

• mullet business model

• services that feed products that create services

Questions? Code? Hockey time nao?