Putting Together a Global Development Network

One of the first things other developers and entrepreneurs ask me when I talk about products I’ve created over the years and the specific methods I use to get from an idea to an actual tangible product is how a kid from Nashville managed to put together a global network of designers and developers.  I always feel the answer is never as simple as they would believe.

How I Connected with Europe

I have developed products as three companies over the years.  I started with JennisMedia.  It was a modest start up that I was fortunate enough to create a product concept that had a market.  It was 1996 and I found IRC chat rooms the easiest forum to connect with others who were doing the same development work I was doing.  It was within IRC that I met two very important contacts that held the key to tapping into very inexpensive developers in Europe.  The first contact I met was Jergen Groesbeck, a developer from the Netherlands.  Jergen immediately started introducing me to other fellow programmers in the Netherlands.  Through this network, I was able to build a strong contact list of designers and developers in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and beyond.   The other contact was Slava Vorotaev.   Where Jergen was strongly connected in Western Europe, Slava was the man amongst developers in the old Soviet Bloc.

Outsourcing

Quickly, I found myself presented with the option of outsourcing significant amounts of development to small development groups located in countries like Poland, Ukraine and Estonia.  Several of my early development partners went on to work for a little start up called Skype  (I’m not one bit jealous about it either.  Ok, maybe a little).  It was a very successful process for me.  I opened myself up to the idea of not having 100% control and in return I got products that were well built and matched specs.  Now, many will knock this method of getting the work done, but when you’re a entrepreneur on a budget you have to look for every competitive advantage available.  Working through cheap overseas was the price I was willing to pay to get ahead.  And get ahead I did.

The Fall and Rise

For several years, it felt like shipping work over the Eastern Europe was a dying trend.  I was convinced it was dead the day I learned of European shops outsourcing their work to Bangalore.  But, with the rise of the Euro and Eastern European countries still on their old currencies, their money suddenly didn’t go as far as it once did.  Combine this with the fact that Twitter’s success has brought developers from around the world into conversations that they would never had participated with otherwise and outsourcing to Eastern Europe is on the rise again.  Its easier now to procure talent from overseas than it was when I first started doing it over a decade ago.

Getting Connected

If you really want to connect with cheap global development options, here is how I might go about doing it in 2009:  The first step has to be getting involved in Twitter.  Finding developers who seem to share a common development philosophy is a huge first step.  Once you’ve connected on Twitter, Skype is an absolute requirement.  You may user Google Talk/Grand Central, AIM or another IM product, but the overwhelming majority of European programmers are on Skype first and foremost.  Skype also provides a cheap communications tool to those countries where you might otherwise rack up huge phone charges really quick.  The third tool you must have is PayPal.  You have to pay them somehow and even though they lose 3% with PayPal, they know its about the only way to securely get money into Eastern Europe, especially Russia and Ukraine.

Now that you’ve connected with some developers, if you want to have a long term relationship where everyone is on the same page, then pack your bags.  The face to face meeting is essential to the success of any long distance development partnership.  It always help if you’re a seasoned traveler who doesn’t appear out of place when you meet your new contact in Moscow’s Red Square or by Charles Bridge in Prague.  You’re new contact will be impressed that you’ve traveled the distance to formally secure the relationship, but doing so like a tourist will be a sure sign of how green you truly are as a global developer.

Finally, don’t be afraid to reach out if you are an entrepreneur looking to get ahead.  Nobody’s going to fault you for doing what you have to do to succeed.  Once you have succeeded in your venture, that is the time to start bringing more work to people in your backyard.  You may decide that you would rather have everything local.  You have a better chance of maintaining full control over your projects.  It will come at some cost though.

If your interested in making European connections, check out my first European partner @groesbeck on Twitter.

Review: Spymaster

As a developer who works with various APIs, I am always compelled to try new products that utilize the Twitter API.  I am not a person you would consider to be a gamer.  I never play games, online or otherwise, which makes my involvement in Spymaster a rare exception to the rule.

I received an invite from a colleague and proceeded to sign up and invite other Twitter followers with little hesitation.  I understood this type of invite could turn some followers off and they would unfollow me.  I sent it to people I thought would be interested and if some unfollowed me, too bad.  I probably wasn’t contributing enough to their daily feed to be worthy of a follow anyways if all it took was a silly invite to get an unfollow.

I did get a few unfollows.  I also got some follows from the game from people I was attacking.  It turns out that I actually gained some really cool followers from this who are in the tech industry and share similar backgrounds.  You can never have too many birds of the same feather.

Game Review

It has been about 48 hours since I started playing the game.  The first thing I did when setting up my profile was to disable updates and most direct messages.  The game gives you extra currency for actions taken if you allow it to tweet notifications for you regarding your activity.  By no means does disabling these features hinder you in playing the game.  It does take a little longer to achieve goals without the notifications.

It is a shame that the service wants to be so heavily integrated with Twitter updates.  The turnoff for most revolves around the fact that having a few friends who have notifications turned on can hijack your feed with a ton of #spymaster posts, which for all purposes are useless for those not playing the game.  For a follower who is not playing the game, an update that states “I just acquired a safehouse in Berlin #spymaster” is the equivalent of tweeting “I just scratched my ass”.

For the players, here is the catch about Spymaster initiated user updates on Twitter.  Watching others posting activity about their actions is the best intelligence to know when the time is right to launch an attack.  When another player has successfully launched an attack is the prime time to attack that player.  If you want to get into the game and play it properly, this is how you do it.  Twitter now gives you intelligence.  But, for the player who is savvy with both Twitter and Spymaster, turning notifications off is the best way to stay covert and avoid alienating your followers on Twitter.

UX-UI Review

I have yet to encounter a bug from the site, which shows that the site was tested well before it was launched.  The experience is pain-free, with all actions well defined, making it easy to make correlations between actions, consequences and prizes obtained.

The site runs an AJAX status bar at the top that shows time until next update, assets, health and energy levels.  Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it does the job pretty well.   The user experience is clean and feels like you’re involved in spy game, complete with dark facade, shadows and the lingo commonly associated with international espionage.

Room for Improvement

I have just two suggestions.  Games on Twitter will only work if you can play them behind the scenes without turning the service into an action log for the game.  Taking Twitter and using it for game communication instead of compelling person to person communication is not good for your game or for Twitter.  Finding a way to gather intelligence without getting hijacking Twitter feeds to do it is critical.

I would also suggest the ability to review revenue generated from safe houses.  Right now, this is a mystery to me.

Th virality of this game will probably serve as a good model for others who want to create a buzz through services like Twitter.  I would encourage anyone who aspires to use Twitter to create an immediate impact for a product or service to check out Spymaster and think of it as one of potentially many ways to create buzz.  Overall, I am glad I chose to play the game and also glad I started it on a weekend because its a productivity leech.  With Monday quickly approaching, I’ll have to cease my covert operations on Spymaster in favor of those that actually pay the bills.

Mother’s Day Thoughts

When I was little I spent more time around my father than my mother.  My father was the one who was always at sporting events and taking me along.  My mother, I guess you could say, was the quintessential housewife.  She made the dinners, washed the clothes and mad sure everything on the homefront was in order.

Later in life I began to learn that my mother was the calming force in my life, the one person who put me and my interest in front of her own.  When I was struggling to find myself in my early 20’s, my mother was there.  Even when I was less than respectful or appreciative of her love, she never stopped looking out for me. 

There is no doubt in my mind that I am who I am as a result of my mother.  My drive to succeed is a trait I can trace back to her, with my understanding that there are consequences for everything you do and to make sure you are alway aware of the decisions you make.

For this I am thankful for my mother on this day and I hope that each of you are half as lucky as I am.

this might be the reason for newpapers’ issues

every Wednesday, the Tennessean delivers a free lightweight edition for Nashville-Davidson County called ‘Davidson A.M.’. While I didn’t request it, they deliver it anyways, except in my case they deliver it twice.

So, it get two of a newspaper that I consider not worth my time to read. You may ask yourself, why do they deliver it twice? Well, I have an oval driveway with two entryways to my street. So, I guess its the paperboy’s ingenious idea to drop a paper at the foot of each end of my driveway. Its a complete waste. I toss each issue, every week, in the trash without taking a second to take the paper out of its plastic sleeve.

Inefficient, impractical, and unnecessary… That pretty much sums up the greater issue.

The Sasquatch of Twitter Error Messages

Is this like the Sasquatch of Twitter error messages?  Its like an error message you get with the fail whale fails.  This is a combination 502 and 403 error.  In case you aren’t up on your HTML Server Status codes, 502 is the error message for a bad gateway.  This means the server responsible for taking your request and sending it to the proper servers for processing has failed.  The 403 error is a Forbidden Request.  These requests are denied when the server processing the request is instructed not to process the request.

I am curious, have you seen this error before?