April Fools

I wonder how many startups will announce large VC rounds tomorrow, April 1st? I predict reading about that at least 4 times tomorrow, just in the blogs I follow .

Excellent post on paying down technical debt. This is an excellent analogy for something many of us have known in our guts for some time, but have trouble articulating so clearly. I can think of several occasions where I’ve had to explain this concept to a big boss. I’ll keep this article handy now for explanation.

One more analogy I’d add: when you find yourself in serious need of a re-write, that’s the equivalent of technical bankruptcy.

Wow. I was just reading up on what’s packed in to the new Safari Beta (v4).

Not only does it have the usual “it’s now the fastest browser” stuff, because they all leap frog each other with speed anyway, but some impressive “net new” capabilities:

1. Dramatic UI improvements like cover flow and something kind of Expose-like for browsing your top sites and history
2. CSS effects and animation – I wonder what this will do to some of the Javascript libraries out there? Allow them to trim this stuff out? Only once the other browsers catch up of course…
3. Live fonts – so you can specify the fonts for a page and if the machine doesn’t have them installed, it’ll go get them automatically. No more being limited to the handful of “web-safe” fonts.
4. And for the developer: a SQL browser for the local offline database, that actually lets you run queries against it through the UI… and some pretty advanced performance optimization tools & debuggers!

What really excites me, because I’m not personally surprised at what Apple has come up with (I have a lot of faith in their ability to raise the bar) is that it’s not just Safari on Macs that will reap the benefits of this next wave of enhancements. It’s the iPhone, Safari on Windows (which will likely receive a boost in adoption as they are going with native Windows chrome now to make the Windows users feel more at home) and Google’s Chrome, which is coming on strong and is based on the same rendering engine as Safari.

I feel like it really is the golden age of Web development. The browser really has become a professional run-time environment. Finally!

In the last 4 months, I’ve had conversations with 5 different US-based VC’s who’ve approached Devshop about growth capital. It’s wonderful to know that Devshop is popping up on people’s radars, particularly among large VC firms. Some of this is due to the Red Herring press this past Fall.

With each of these conversations, it was clear that it’s too early in the company life cycle to be entertaining these kinds of deals. They typically put in amounts in the $10 million range, which at this point would swallow up the company a couple times over.

That said, I am starting a new investment round. We’ve worked with local Angel investors in the past and it has worked well. The company has been built so far with a mixture of bootstrapping and Angel investment.

Devshop has been operating since Fall 2005, though it was in R&D mode until Spring 2007. For the last year and a bit, we’ve been essentially test marketing the Devshop product and the indicators are good. We’ve received a lot of feedback from users about where to go next. It’s time to ramp up a little and pick up the pace.

Ideally we’d like to raise $500k to $1 million. This could be done with one institution, or a syndicate of individuals and/or institutions. Interested parties can contact me directly: craig (at) devshop.com.

Jeff Atwood editorializes the Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design, illustrating the point that mindlessly porting desktop conventions in UI to the Web may not be the best approach.

Read the full post.

I’ve always liked web-apps that port the “power” of the desktop (i.e. fast responsiveness, not necessarily a page load each action, etc.), but still feel free to shake off some of the desktop’s limitations.

On the Web, we seem to be headed towards the idea of “interactive documents”, which put the content first and the controls second (on-demand). On the desktop, the apps were first and the content was second. If all we’re doing is porting, then we’re pulling the bad forward along with the good. Better to consciously decide what we keep, and what we throw out in favor of something better.

He contrasts an AJAX-Web email client with a desk-top client. Too bad he didn’t include (or couldn’t find?) a Web email client that truly shed the legacy of the desktop in favor of something next-level for the Web. I’d like to see that.

It appears that Owen Byrne, one of the co-founders of Digg, will be speaking about his experiences with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) in building one of the 'Nets biggest sites.
The event is hosted by TravelPod and is happening next Thursday (Dec. 4th) at their offices. More info can be found here.
Owen is now managing TravelPod's lab.

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CORRECTION: The event is on Tuesday the 2nd, not Thursday the 4th. My bad.

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