{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 32 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

I spend my days almost entirely developing in PHP and Javascript with the occasional trip to Bash. For the most part, the style of the code ends up looking mostly the same, object oriented PHP and a mix of OO and functional Javascript. Because of this, I’ve been researching a couple of new languages I’d be interested in testing out. Anyway, here is my list – I’d love any feedback or suggestions!

Scala

From Wikipedia:

Scala is an object-functional programming and scripting language for general software applications, statically typed, designed to concisely express solutions in an elegant, type-safe and lightweight (low ceremonial) manner. Scala includes full support for functional programming (including currying, pattern matching, algebraic data types, lazy evaluation, tail recursion, immutability, etc.). It cleans up what are often considered to have been poor design decisions in Java (e.g. type erasure, checked exceptions, the non-unified type system) and adds a number of other features designed to allow cleaner, more concise and more expressive code to be written.

So what makes Scala interesting? Personally, a couple of things stand out. First, the type system looks powerful while also being unobtrusive enough to not offend my dynamic sensibilities. I’ll butcher any explanation of how it works but this presenation does a much better job. Another interesting Scala feature is its rich support for functional programming techniques. I’m excited to try out things like currying and pattern mathing. The last Scala feature that is particularly appealing is that it can be run through the interpreter or compiled to a JAR. Because of this, it would facilitate writing simple “one off” scripts and running them through the interpreter.

Go

Go has been making the rounds on the blogosphere lately so naturally its piqued my interest. From Wikipedia:

Go aims to provide the efficiency of a statically typed compiled language with the ease of programming of a dynamic language. Other goals include:

Safety: Type-safe and memory-safe.

Intuitive concurrency by providing “goroutines” and channels to communicate between them.

Efficient garbage collection “with low enough overhead and no significant latency”.

High-speed compilation.

At face value, Go looks familiar and comfortable primarily because of its C inspired syntax and imperative style. The big ticket Go features that look the most interesting are concurrency support and its package and dependency management system. I haven’t written much (or any?) concurrent code and exploring Go’s “goroutines” seems like a great place to start. The official docs provide a great overview of the concurrency features Go exposes. Managing dependencies is painful and nothing is worse than getting stuck in dependency hell. Go has a unique approach to solving these issues, favoring convention over configuration. This post has a great rundown of why Go’s solution looks like a win.

Lua

From Wikipedia:

Lua , from Portuguese: lua meaning moon; explicitly not “LUA”) is a lightweight multi-paradigm programming language designed as a scripting language with “extensible semantics” as a primary goal. Lua is cross-platform since it is written in ISO C.[1] Lua has a relatively simple C API, thus “Lua is especially useful for providing end users with an easy way to program the behavior of a software product without getting too far into its innards.”

Functionally, Lua is a fully featured scripting language written in C which makes it a perfect candidate for embedding places where users need to be able to “script” the behavior of a program. Looking at Wikipedia, Lua has made its way into dozens of projects – including Nginx and Apache. From a language perspective, Lua looks “clean” and somewhat similar to Javascript but the most interesting feature is the possibility of embedding it into a host application. PHP also has out of the box functionality to support embedding Lua.

Anyway, that’s my list – I’d love to hear about any other languages worth checking out.

Lately, I’ve become interested in the concept and process of structured brainstorming. What makes “structured” brainstorming distinct from its passive cousin is that it has some sort of process and is organized at a specific time. I’d argue that the goal of a structured brainstorming session should be to go in with a loose set of big questions, brainstorm, and then come out with a set of refined questions, themes, and next steps. In our experience, the best way to mentally organize a brainstorm is to group things like ideas, questions, and links under “themes”, continually add to the them, and then sort and prune at the end. Unfortunately, we haven’t really found a software tool that makes this process awesome, let alone easy.

So using this framework, what would make the ultimate brainstorming tool?

Non-linear

One of the most powerful aspects of a brainstorming session is that its non-linear. You easily be able to add “first act” ideas at the same time as adding “late stage” themes without disrupting the flow. In addition to adding, being able to organize information in a non-linear fashion avoids introducing a rigid structure, before the data is really understood.

Organizing data in a non-linear format is one of the primary issues of using a regular text document for a brainstorm. It makes it difficult to add things “out of order” and immediately introduces a rigid structure, since everything is flowing top to bottom.

Collaborative

Successful collaboration is a key point in any team activity and brainstorming is no different. An effective tool should effectively involve all participants by making it easy for everyone to contribute. Since the goal is to eventually prune down anyway, capturing input from everyone involved strengthens the process since it gives a voice to viewpoints that might otherwise go unheard. In our experience, collaborating around a whiteboard works well until 4 people are involved and then it quickly degenerates. By 6 actors, including key stakeholders, some people are hesitant to contribute since they’re afraid of “looking dumb”.

An ideal tool would allow everyone to easily contribute without disrupting active conversations and also without fear of embarrassment.

Linking

Having a ton of great data is awesome but without any way to develop links between the nodes you’re really just left with a massive list. Linking as a feature would let you “chain” pieces of data together, similar to “a href”s in an HTML document, allowing you to develop richer connections within your data.

Current digital tools like Trello or Evernote support linking and I’d imagine an ideal tool supporting it in a similar fashion. The primary concern would be making it easy to visualize the connections between nodes to drive a better understanding of how things fit together.

Ok so we’ve laid out some features, now what does this thing look like? I think ideally this is a SaaS product with a mobile client that looks like a giant table top. The table top would let you add themes, elements within those themes, and also let you create links between anything you’ve added to the table. So does this tool exist? Unfortunately, I don’t think so – or at least I haven’t found it yet.

Anyway, I’d love to hear about your experiences with brainstorming, especially what tools you’ve used.

Yahoo’s acquisition of RockMelt last week kicked off another round of armchair quarterbacking questioning the wisdom of aquiring so many startups purely for talent. Only time will ultimately validate the strategy but I think an interesting discussion is given Yahoo!’s position, what would you build given the influx of new talent?

Build a low cost, gaming focused tablet

With the popularity and penetration of tablets accelerating, now would be a great time for Yahoo! to enter the space. In addition to consumer interest, Android 4.3 is rock solid, OEMs are comfortable building “decent” tablets, and Amazon has proved that alternate Android app stores work. So what if Yahoo! built a low cost, gaming focused tablet, with an alternative app store and developer friendly terms? I think they’d be able to successfully capture the low to mid market and then primarily drive revenue via app and in-app purchases.

Double down on Fantasy Sports

One of the few Yahoo! properties that I actually see people visit are it’s Fantasy Sports offerings. Given that, I think it makes sense for Yahoo! to double down on Fantasy and make it an absolutely killer offering. Things like an open API, facilitating playing with real money, and Nate Silver style statistics would set Yahoo! Fantasy apart and ultimately restore the “cool” around the Yahoo! brand.

A killer second screen experience

Remember that tablet Yahoo! just built? Well why not leverage it to put relevant “pop culture” and “celeb gossip” content in front of Yahoo!’s users? It’s not sexy to talk about, but a lot of Yahoo!’s traffic is driven by this type of content and if they can monetize it more effectively than display advertising it should be an easy win. In addition, with the “new” Fantasy Sports available Yahoo! would be able to provide relevant content during live sports and monetize those users as well.

Anyway, whatever Yahoo! ends up building I’m sure it’ll be a bold departure from it’s old path. They have the cash, talent, and hopefully the vision to reinvent a once great Internet giant into a real contender.

I came across an article on phpro.org about the difference between isset, empty and isnull methods that I found it informative so I’m going to summarize and re-post it here.

There are often times where you need to check for empty or null values or if a variable is set. It’s pointed out that in many circumstances the wrong function is used to make these assertions. The code may end up working; however, in some cases using the wrong function returns a value that programmer didn’t expect and leads to errors.

Actions speak much louder than words so I’ll cut to the example. The example script tests the following functions and operators:

isset()
empty()
is_null()
==
===

against the following values:

no value set
null
zero
false
numeric value
empty string

and builds out a comparison table (see below) of the results. The notice above the table is because the isset() function is trying to check a variable that has not been initialized(Not Set).

I’ll be honest, I never knew passing a zero into the empty() function returns a true!

Anyways, the chart below ends up becoming a useful reference guide as well. The code used to produce the table is at the bottom of this post.

The Code

Published in 2011, Eric Reis’s book The Lean Startup became the blueprint that dozens of “web 2.0” companies were built against. At a high level, the book promotes an “agile” like approach to developing a new company. Loosely speaking, the “happy path” to building a new startup would involve synthesizing ideas into a minimal viable product (MVP), receiving feedback, rapidly iterating, and finally reaching product market fit. Due to its simplicity and wide applicability, the “lean startup methodology” has become wildly popular especially among first time entrepreneurs. With this popularity, the concept of a “MVP” has basically become a buzzword rallying cry to justify what people are building.

Unfortunately, a common problem we’ve noticed is that people focus solely on the MVP and end up neglecting the other parts of the business, notably sales and marketing. To combat this, you should really be thinking of building a minimal viable business instead of specifically an MVP. Ok great, so what are the components of an MVB?

Product (MVP)

The product that you’re actually building is ultimately going to be one of the most important parts of your new business. Surprisingly, I’d argue that the exact features that make it into the MVP aren’t terribly important. What is key, is that your users experience an “aha!” moment while using the product which will help you convey the value. Another key takeaway is less is more. Start small and grow the product to avoid leaving users overwhelmed, confused, and discouraged.

User Acquisition

Awesome. So you’ve built a fantastic product, now how are you going to get in front of people? First time tech founders often overlook an effective user acquisition strategy and it ends up being a major risk factor for them. Hallmarks of an effective strategy are that it needs to be replicable, measurable, and generally affordable. Because of this, “getting great PR”, “going viral” or “buying a super bowl commercial” generally don’t qualify as tractable strategies. Instead, things like paid search, affiliate marketing, and native content ads would be more reasonable strategies to consider.

Community

Community is another area that is often overlooked. Even though it’s usually associated with B2C companies, it’s still important for B2B companies. On the B2C side, the majority of users are less likely to engage with “empty” social sites since no one wants to be the only person at the party. You’ll need a strategy to seed any social features your site has and also keep the heartbeat there once you launch. From a B2B perspective, you’ll still need to think about things like answering support issues, writing newsletters, and generating blog content. Although they seem trivial, having an actionable plan for these “community” issues helps establish user trust and win brand champions.

Metrics

The last piece of the “minimum viable business” are the KPIs and metrics that you’re looking to track. Tracking key indicators is important because they provide a yardstick to let you know if you’re moving in the the right direction. A key point is to make sure you’re tracking useful numbers. Vanity metrics like “# of followers” or “page views” aren’t really going to help you determine the health of your business. You’ll need numbers like “customer acquisition cost” or “lifetime value” which help you distill how your company is doing.

That’s a wrap

Wrapping up, building an MVP is just one of the components of building a successful startup. You’ll need to consider several other important aspects which will help you build, measure, and iterate along your path to building a successful company.

As with all advice, just remember that 90% of all advice is bullshit.

Fun: Three programming languages I want to experiment with