Entries from June 2007 ↓

Assorted recommended reading for you!

• Now with Safari on Windows, if you are a Firefox fan like me, you may want to check out how you can customize Firefox to do more like Safari!
• If you are really interested in finding out where Firefox is headed, you may want to read Ars Technica’s review of Gran Paradiso, the Firefox 3.
• If you are in or around Mumbai, you may also want to drop in to Magnet office on 14th July, since Seth Bindernagel and JT Batson from Mozilla will be here. More on that in the next few days.
• You may be a great programmer, but if you know project management, you can do much better development! SitePoint has an introductory article on project management for web geeks. If you are one, check it out.
• If you are wondering what’s happening at Google these days, the Google Labs: A look under the hood is a good summary of things that will come up big in the next few months. I agree that the 411 services will be big, though I prefer to use the Thunderbird RSS reader!
• TED has a presentation from Stefan Sagmeister on how design can make you happy. Chris Glass has done a terrific job on 16 points you can follow to make happy, and thanks to him for the replacement signs for subway graphic that appears here.

Here are the 16 points, if you follow, will make you more open, creative and happier! (found via 43 folders)

• Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
• Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
• Being not truthful works against me.
• Helping other people helps me.
• Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.
• Everything I do always comes back to me.
• Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
• Over time I get used to everything and start taking if for granted.
• Money does not make me happy.
• Traveling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
• Assuming is stifling.
• Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
• Trying to look good limits my life.
• Worrying solves nothing.
• Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
• Having guts always works out for me.

If you are familiar with Extreme Programming, these rules are not new to you. If you are not, they will certainly give you a lot of insight in good software development. We have been using many XP principles in our projects, and have had very good success.

Here are the XP rules, straight from the XP website.

Planning

• User stories are written.
• Release planning creates the schedule.
• Make frequent small releases.
• The Project Velocity is measured.
• The project is divided into iterations.
• Iteration planning starts each iteration.
• Move people around.
• A stand-up meeting starts each day.
• Fix XP when it breaks.

Designing

• Simplicity.
• Choose a system metaphor.
• Use CRC cards for design sessions.
• Create spike solutions to reduce risk.
• No functionality is added early.
• Refactor whenever and wherever possible.

Coding

• The customer is always available.
• Code must be written to agreed standards.
• Code the unit test first.
• All production code is pair programmed.
• Only one pair integrates code at a time.
• Integrate often.
• Use collective code ownership.
• Leave optimization till last.
• No overtime.

Testing

• All code must have unit tests.
• All code must pass all unit tests before it can be released.
• When a bug is found tests are created.
• Acceptance tests are run often and the score is published.

Sometimes I think these are too idealistic. The real world demands are to deliver working software fast. A team that’s tuned to extreme programming can certainly deliver good code quickly, but most programmers are taught differently. They are not tuned to pair programming or test driven development. Many managers too doubt the value of these principles. That makes it more difficult to implement them.

I am dreaming of a project where we can implement all these rules!

I attended the Mobile Monday Mumbai June event, hosted at Reliance Communications. A large portion of the Monday was traveling to and from the venue. But it was a good experience.

Reliance Communication has a campus spread over some 148 acres. About 13,000 employees work there, and this is also the place where you can see the National Network Operations Center - NNOC. The famous NASA like control center setup of Reliance. We reached there at 4.45 and were quickly taken to the NNOC tour. The whole tour was informative - how they laid cables across India in just two years, the 500 Rs. phones that got a million subscribers in two days and even the plans for expanding the services and network reach.

An interesting demo was the digital home entertainment / communication system they are building. This is a settop box, connected via cable. There is a wired and wireless remote, and it doubles up as a VoIP phone and input device. The box connects to the TV - can show the typical cable entertainment channels, and also a whole lot of other content hosted on Reliance servers - magazines, karaoke video songs and much more. I remembered the “Microsoft Home” setup I had seen ten years ago when I was at Microsoft campus. They had a similar TV setup, and the whole setup integrated extremely well with other devices in home.

The NNOC was a good sight! 20,000 square feet area, giant full wall screens on two sides of the walls and about a 100 people monitoring both wired and wireless network of the company - spread across the country. It is great fun to look at the 225m² projection wall that Barco built for Reliance - and it’s also fun to watch the whole thing from a bridge suspended few meters in the air!

The presentations by Anil Pande and Vinod Vasudevan were good. Insightful and inspiring, both the sessions gave a clue of what’s emerging in the mobile applications field. The idea of payments to a mobile phone was very interesting. I got to learn a lot about operators, their strategies for the future and the overall environment in the mobile space in India.

The panel discussions and questions after that revolved around mobile app vs mobile web, revenue sharing debates, operator agnostic applications, telecom regulations and a lot of other common issues. The revenue share part comes in any discussion I believe! Content providers are not happy with the share they get from the operators. Operators hold the customers and squeeze the most from the revenues. The Reliance guys described how NTT DoCoMo charges separately for the data usage and then gives a higher percentage to the content provider - essentially resulting in lower revenue for the content provider. The debates went on until Veer - the moderator - said no more questions on revenue share anymore!

The discussions over dinner varied greatly. From my crazy idea of mobile phone being used in a grid computing network, connected with a TV for output; to new products people are launching in the mobile space, to how Danger designs easy to use phone systems. And also high tech research happening at Infosys SETLabs to VoIP solutions using Asterisk.

I made a comment at the end of the group discussions that there is a lot of hype about mobile apps and its reach, but the reality is different. It’s very difficult for a new person to first develop a killer mobile app, and then to take it to the customers. There are numerous hurdles on the way and the path is definitely not as rosy as many evangelists paint. Krishna Durbha of Reliance caught me on this at dinner time. We had an interesting conversation about the future of application development, how it’s shaping up and how one needs to keep playing to win. There is good money at the end, but one must keep walking! Don’t get into the mobile app space with the hope to make a quick success, it’s not the way the game works!

On my way back, I had great company of TCS Hyderabad folks. Between jokes, pranks and business wisdom, I didn’t realize when we reached back.

Thanks to Veer and all the organizing team. I am looking forward to more MoMo events. And especially MoMo becoming a platform to support and encourage entrepreneurs who want to get into this field!