I’ve been working form home for quite some time now, in the beginning I lived alone and I worked from home a few days a week. Working the balance in an office with real people. I found I was far more productive when I was in an home than in an office, mostly let’s face it, because people had to pick up the phone to interrupt me.

Recently things have changed, my partner had a little baby girl and we’ve moved. The house is bigger and I now have a room which I use almost exclusively as my office, which is a good thing because previously I’ve been working from a series of one bedroom flats and that just wouldn’t work now.

Headphones and a door that closes

I have both and think they’re infinitely important. My daughter is very young but between myself and Becca there is the policy that if the door is closed I’m busy. Unless someone is bleeding to death I don’t want to know- we treat the closed door much like we’d treat it if I was working in an office half an hours commute away, if it wouldn’t be important enough to call me away from work in the car, then it’s not important enough to call me away from work here.

Sometimes, even with the door closed there can be a fair bit of noise and things to distract me, I have a good pair of headphones which acoustically seal me off from the rest of the world.

Working Hours

I try to keep my working hours 9-5, just as I would with any job. Mostly because that’s when everyone else is working and if I need to talk to someone, or if they need to talk to me they’re most likely to try. I’m pretty flexible about it though and unless I need to deliver something I’ll sometimes take a few hours off during the day to do the dishes, go do the recycling (everyone else goes on the weekend, but it’s almost always quiet weekday mornings) or just spend some time with my daughter to give my partner a break. I make the time up evenings and weekends, but for the most part you’ll find me adhering to the same schedule as the rest of the world - I just get to stay in bed while the rest of you commute.

Works for me

Working from home works well for me, it takes discipline but to be honest it’s not as hard as some people would like to make you think. Also for those bosses out there that don’t trust staff to work from home - if you can’t trust them not to bunk off at home, you probably can’t trust them not to bunk off in the office either.

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I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about how to go about hiring hackers. Well not just recently, it seems to be common thing people ask, because it’s one of the hardest things to do. You’re using an interview, or even a series of interviews to try your best to determine if the person is going to be up to the task.

The problem is of course, you’re really just determining if the person interviews well, or if they’re the graduates that they’ve got good marks. The real problem is of course neither of the two matter because neither of them have much if any bearing on how good a coder a candidate is going to be.

The problem is exacerbated in a startup because unlike some of the more successful bigger players you really can’t afford to take people on a trial basis for 6 months. What can a startup do?

There are a lot of universities that run placement programs for their students, programs allowing them to get real industry work experience. I’ve also worked in companies that made it a policy to hire students for internships then offer the best jobs once they’ve graduated. It was a great way to get talent.

What if you need to hire to fill a more senior role, or you’re not hiring at the right time of year? Student internships usually start once at the same time every year so unless you’re looking for fill a role then, you’re shit out of luck.

I’ve toyed with the idea of a ‘hacker camp’, getting all the candidates together, and paying them to work as consultants on a project - then hiring the best into permanent positions. All the candidates need to be free to work on the project, and a lot of people would be pretty scared to leave a job to take part and some jobs would prevent them from working on the project, so running it over a weekend might be a good idea, but it limits the scope of your project. You’d also still need to have interviews, to make sure you were getting candidates who were really interested in the job, and also to weed out any candidates you knew were totally unsuitable.

I think it’s important that a ‘hacker camp’ should produce something at the end of the weekend and you should get as much of your existing staff involved as possible. To make the cost easier to swallow you could even go so far as making the deliverable a new feature or part of your existing product but that’s not as important as actually delivering something, because that will be the bottom line when it comes to integrating them into your team.

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As I’ve announced here, we’ve recently taken the difficult decision to put development of Citrus in hold, indefinitely (let’s be realistic, probably forever). I’m now wondering what if anything we should announce about our new project.

Is openness a strength or a weakness? Is there value to the community in publicly documenting our design decisions, and how we’ve come to them? Is it something our competitors could and would use against us? Is there anyway to mitigate the effects?

I like what Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have done with their series of podcasts on the Stack Overflow blog where they’ve released their design meetings as a series of podcasts and given us all an insight into how they’ve come to some of the decisions they’ve taken. But let’s face it I’m neither Jeff or Joel and I don’t get anywhere near their traffic. So the first obvious question I’m asking myself is if it’s even worth the effort of writing posts, let alone recording and releasing podcasts.

Next is the question about maintaining a competitive advantage, given the fact that our team is so small, just the two of us at the moment; I’m only working about half time on the project and Simon, who isn’t a coder is working even less. So giving someone a guide to competing with us could be downright foolish. Then again, nobody is really listening are they? So does it even matter?

The other question, which I think is equally important as the project grows - hopefully into a product is what if any level of openness is appropriate post launch? Will an open discussion of ongoing design decisions as they’re being taken before, or even as they’re released be of any benefit to the community? Communities can be some of the biggest supporters and can be some of your most passionate users - sometimes these passions can work both ways? What level of support ongoing will a public discussion of the decisions you’re taking, before users have all the prototyped interfaces to play with, be required? Is there an ongoing effort you’ll need to make to maintain the level of trust and confidence of the community?

I think I’ve talked myself out of a podcast of our internal discussions, for now - but I’m still keen to use community interaction to help us develop a product that meets the needs of the people who are interested in using it and to drum up support and interest in the project. I’ll no doubt return to this topic in the coming weeks as I develop a clearer idea of how I think we should accomplish that.

If any of the few of you out there listening have any questions or comments, please let me know your thoughts.

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First we started to explore, then quickly we needed to figure out where we were and we’ve been building increasing numbers ever more sophisticated maps, guide books and other sources of location based information ever since. The extension of this location based information to mobile Internet enabled devices is the obvious next step and potentially huge market. Just think of all the location based data people pay for:

• Mapping probably the biggest market segment, and the first which we’ll see device convergence. Look to see the traditional GPS hardware/software become applications for the current and next generation devices.
• Reviews A common feature of newspapers, local and region
• Business Directories again, think of the big yellow book of business for every area. It’s one of the most common things to look for in an area.
• Travel Guides More than just reviews, travel guides also provide us with areas of interest and all of that is very useful in an up to date online service

All of this is pretty obvious and most of it exists now. The problem up to now has been the walled garden approach taken by the mobile phone companies. They had the ability to determine position, but wanted to charge for it. Unfortunately for us consumers, charging for that data has meant that for the most part services would need to turn a profit for every single request, from the start or they’d be very expensive to develop and very quickly.

Mobile data has recently become very cheap and new devices with integrated ability to determine their location is having a profound impact on the mobile landscape. They’re allowing us to build services which instead of answering the question: where is my nearest X, will let us explore the area around us. Mapping the wealth of knowledge on the internet to physical locations and allowing us to actually input data when we’re most likely to want to - when we’re actually there.

From experience, when I’m out there the data I want most is about out there.

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I’ve been a bit lax with the posting again, but I’m trying. Continuing with the theme where I left off last time, starting companies in the downturn (likely to be a recession), the last time we talked the worlds markets were in turmoil, the banks had stopped lending money to us and to each other. Things have continued and are even worse two weeks on.

Now some would say is the time to tighten belts and budgets, for prudence sake. At least that’s what everyone else is doing, and what we’re doing at home to be fair. It’s cheaper shopping, soups and casseroles for the winter. Many businesses are reacting the same, I’ve heard it from them and so have you. Even businesses that have nothing to do with the finacial or property markets are tightening their budgets, and feeling or causing the pinch to be felt.

Is that good news for the nimble small business? Like every other news, yes. Small businesses face unique challenges their larger competitors don’t but they have one major advantage - they can move and react faster.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting anyone should go on a spending spree. But neither am I suggesting that now is a time to be completely miserly either. What I am suggesting is that while your larger competitors, or even competitors of similar sizes are worrying about the future and cutting back their development efforts; or cutting back their staff, salaries and benefits. It’s a great time for you to make the leap to the next level, and come out ahead when this is all over- because it will eventually end, one way or another.

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I think it’s clear now, despite all the best hopes of an easy ride, that the economy has gone to shit. I also think it’s clear that no matter how far you try to bury your head in the sand, it’s affecting tech and other industries now. The knock on effect has a arrived and the inability of some to get operating credit as well as the fear of not being able to get credit if they might need it has lead to some belt tightening already, and there is more of that to come.

Maybe it’s a little cynical of me, but I think that some consumer websites which are lean and well capitalised must be liking the idea that people are going to be out of work. I mean without their boss bothering them to get off facebook and do some work - they can just do that all day, can’t they?

Really though, I think this time around the Internet is probably one of the better placed industries. We’ll feel it less and later than others and we’ll come out of it better off and earlier than some. Big ticket items are going to be the first to go, houses and cars are already down and falling fast. Holidays are out, entertainment and going out is suffering and it’s bound to get worse. That’s going to leave people with more time to waste, at home in front of their TVs and in front of their computers.

When confidence and spending starts to rise again, we’ll start to see people with a little money chasing bargains with time on their hands - isn’t that what internet shopping is all about?

The core fact of the matter is the economy is in the shitter because of banks - there is nothing fundamentally wrong with tech companies today. It’s not anything like the previous bust, it’s not a correction reigning in stupid valuations for companies with no clear path to revenue let alone profit.

Is it a good time to start a company though? That depends on how much if any investment you need. If you can bootstrap, and you should, then it’s a great time. If you’re going to need to find investment to get your idea off the ground, you’ll have a hard time with it. Until we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we’re sure it’s the end of tunnel investors are all going to assume it’s just a train.

A bit latter than normal, sorry about that. I’m really trying to maintain the post a day thing and I’ve been scheduling them in advance - I didn’t get a chance to get one scheduled for today so it had to wait till work was out of the way. I’ll endeavour to try harder.

After reading this post what Jamie said hit me as well:

This is when I realized how trained I was in the processes at my former workplaces. This email would have been delayed until it was perfect[...] After fixing this there would be another thing and then another thing. A 2-day project would drag on for a week of redesign, approval, and development[...] It’s one thing to read Getting Real [...] It’s another thing to actually practice the principles. [...] That part is trickier than you think.

I don’t think it’s just Jamie and I don’t think it’s just his former workplaces. We’re all trained to make excuses not to launch, it’s endemic in the culture of most organisations. We endlessly pay lip service to the principals of release early and release often, agreeing in principal
with the principals - but put very little of them into practice.

A manager’s role is to facilitate an organisation’s march towards better - all too often it’s a weak manager that needs constant input on projects and at the root it’s fear of inadequacy on their part that builds a culture of ass covering. It’s obvious that at 37 Signals they don’t suffer from being crippled organisationally when executive decisions need to be made but executives are absent. Their staff are trusted to make decisions and they’re empowered to release better features.

When your last change was ready to deploy, when it was better than what was there, did you release it? If not, how long did it take you to get from that point to actually releasing it and how many people had to give final approval?

Why not empower your staff with a simple test - Is it better than what we have? No flow charts, no organisational hierarchy; just a simple question.

A few months ago we announced Citrus, a suite of tools we’d been developing for estate agents. Despite our bullish attitude to building and selling the application we’ve taken a step back over recent weeks and taken a long hard look at what it is we’re doing. The result of the look is a change of direction, back to some ideas we’ve had in the past about personal search, bookmarking and some location based services. It’s a bit too early to get into too much detail about what we’re planing but I wanted to take the time to give a bit of an explanation of why we’ve changed our minds. 

The market has changed, there is no doubt, but we know that. On reflection though we decided our assumptions were probably wrong. We knew there were not going to be a lot of new players entering the market but existing businesses probably aren’t going to want to change, software tools and they’re not going to want to part with money especially if they had already paid to have a site developed and especially if they’re being forced to lose people.

Then came the next blow to the project,  we were asked to shut down the only current user of our software. They’d decided to put their business on hold because of changes to the Spanish regulations and the current state of the market.  So now we were facing selling a product, in an unfriendly market without our evangelist. 

I’d also be lying if I said that we had generated the interest we’d hoped to generate, we didn’t. It goes without saying that had we generated that interest, or close to that interest we wouldn’t have had the moment of introspection and we wouldn’t have needed to take this difficult decision.

Again, I’m here apologising for letting things slip a little. I’ve been busy and posting has unfortunately suffered for it. I’ve been working hard trying to get things moving for goroam, and it’s been time consuming. I basically spend the last half of last year bogged down with a project and had no time at all to spend on it, so for the last half of this year the focus is really to turn it around, launch a few things and start bringing some revenue in.

Our biggest project at the moment is running an online marketing campaign for Mediqol a medical device consultancy. Our lofty goal is to show up in the first position for the search keywords medical device, short term we’re just interested in optimising the adwords campaigns, and increasing organic traffic for the keywords we know work.

Then there is Citrus - Work is progressing, but we might be looking at an end of the year launch for it. My gut feeling is that we won’t be anything approaching a launch before the end of November.

In the meantime we’re looking into a couple of smaller launches. I have a couple of ideas for tools and products that tie into the Citrus roadmap that we can launch.

I’m going to spend some time this afternoon and weekend writing some posts to get on top of it again.