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 April 27th, 2010 |  |
Last week, my wife and I spent time relearning the game of tennis at the Vic Braden Tennis College in St. George, Utah. I say relearning because the Vic Braden school is less about improving your current game than it is about changing your strokes and strategy to Vic’s way of thinking. That sounds bad, but it isn’t – at least not in my opinion. Vic is a psychologist by training, but he’s spent most of is life playing, coaching and studying professional and amateur tennis. He has researched the game and how it’s played (including using detailed slow motion photography, wireframe analysis and motion capture) thoroughly over the years and has loads of logical reasoning behind his way of playing it. While the changes he encourages are major for most people, they make a lot of sense and are somehow, easier to adopt because of it.
Vic, himself, videotapes each player several times during the session and then meets with small groups to explain what can be totally changed improved. At the end of the session, more taping is done to see what, if any, improvements were made. While Vic was very nice, my changes were almost imperceptible. Yeah, I gotta lot of work to do. 10,000 more balls for each stroke type and I may finally get it.
Vic is over 80 now and has a head full of tennis memories, fact and figures. He knows and works with all of today’s greats as he did with tennis legends in the past. He can tell stories about Roger Federer and Rod Laver and discuss details of their strengths and weaknesses as well what made them both different, but great champions. Braden is a complete crack-up too. He had us all laughing within minutes of our first meeting.
The Vic Braden Tennis College has other locations as well. We chose St. George so that we could spend some time hiking with friends in Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks too. The area is phenomenally gorgeous if you have the time and, more importantly, the energy to explore after Vic kicks the crap out of you.
If you’re a 5.0+ tennis player, you may not want your game entirely disassembled. If you’re playing below that level and feel like you plateaued years ago, this type of game upheaval may be just right for you. It’s a lot of fun and the instructors are very patient. I know, I tested them.
April 15th, 2010 | |
Here at 2-Speed labs, I made an executive decision to forgo an acquisition of Apple’s latest uber-gadget, the iPad. The decision was made because of the product’s strange and questionable position in the computing spectrum between a phone and a laptop and because I always question whether an acquisition of yet another closed product from Apple is good for me or the world. Like I have any influence . . .
The argument on both counts was removed when I was given an iPad by the cool folks at AccuRev as a parting gift – I’m leaving the board there after five years. Thanks AccuRev, it was a very thoughtful gesture.
Like any gadget guy worth his salt, I have been playing with the device constantly since I got it 48 hours ago. While it’s position among the array of computing devices I have is still in question, the massive array of apps available out of the chute in combination with a slick piece of hardware make it, at the very least, a functional and cool toy. But I’m thinking that it’s more than that. Here’s the summary.
Cons:
It’s heavier than I would have expected, I can’t imagine reading a book on it. It would be uncomfortable to hold aloft very long. Additionally, the back is sorta slippery and the iPad easily slips from one’s grip if not held tightly.
Many (most) apps available are formatted for the smaller screen of the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is not an issue for some, but others don’t work well on the larger screen. The apps can pixel-replicated to the larger size, but they don’t look good. This should be resolved over time.
The keyboard layout is less than ideal. This is, of course, a preference thing, but like all things Apple, you get it with their preferences not yours. The apostrophe, for example is not on the main QWERTY keyboard page. That’s OK for texting, but not OK when entering longer text. I am typing this post on the iPad and it’s a bit painful.
The battery isn’t replaceable and there’s no Flash support. Duh, it’s an Apple product.
The glossy display makes reading text somewhat of a challenge in some lighting situations. The Kindle and Nook get this right – a matte screen is better for reading text.
Pros:
I’m surprised this isn’t mentioned more often – the battery life on this thing is simply amazing. I watched 3 hour long videos and did some web browsing and email and only used 10% of the battery (as reported by the device). Subsequent usage indicates that this level of consumption remains consistent.
The screen is 3 bears size. Not too large and not too small. Just right. Big enough to get a great view of media and small enough to be a reasonable size for convenience.
Most apps made for the iPad do a great job using the additional screen space (over what the iPhone offers). Many compromises made for size are abandoned leaving smartly laid out and functional applications.
Photos and video on the device are fantastic. Good screen size, lots of storage and a high resolution and glossy display make the visual experience a winner.
I think that the iPad is going to fill two roles for me. The first is as a way to show off my photos and to view videos when traveling and such – the media role. The second will be as a convenient device for reading email, checking blogs, perusing feeds and web browsing – the time vampire role. I can see using it when watching TV or just hanging around away from my desk. Is it necessary? Totally not. A laptop can do all that stuff. Would I buy one now knowing what I now know? Nope. It’s still not differentiated enough from a small laptop to make it worth the money. Since I already have one though, the combination of it’s convenience and it’s virtually infinite battery life make it pretty fun to use untethered and I’m gonna keep playing. Another Apple victim.
March 31st, 2010 | |
There are no simple ways to determine if you’re hiring the right person for a job and, in my experience, complex approaches to hiring fail almost as frequently as winging it. OK, that’s a little extreme, but you get my point. Those who have used regimented hiring methodologies created by behavioral scientists and organizational behavior experts know what I’m talkin’ about. Nothing is better than simply laying down a few basic guidelines, understanding what you’re really looking for, knowing what’s important to you and listening to your gut to maximize your chances of hiring a good person.
The problem is, what if your gut isn’t experienced enough to help you with your decision? You can be logical about it, for sure. You can ask all the right questions, you can have everyone on the team interview, you can even have a checklist to make sure that the candidate meets all the criteria you set out. But how do you know he or she is the right person?
As with most things interpersonal, I think it’s a combination of many factors, many of them barely perceptible. Combined, they make up what our gut feel is. The way someone acts, how they greet you, the amount they talk, the number and kind of questions they ask. I’ve been thinking about the behaviors I look for when hiring and have been noticing something interesting when going out to coffee or a meal with a candidate (which I recommend – it can take them out of their comfort zone). It’s about how they move through crowds.
I lump people’s movement through crowds into four categories:
- Those that dive into holes in traffic as soon as any opportunity opens up
- Those that wait to see what people around them do
- Those that need to plot out their next few moves before making the jump
- Those who plow into the crowd without thinking or caring about the people they bowl over
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a major amount of generalization going on here and there are usually roles for each type of person in some organization. The question to ask: is what each of these behaviors represents correct for what you’re looking for right now in your organization?
The last group includes people that don’t have the desire or good sense to be part of the crowd or an integral piece of the action. They think about themselves only and likely do the same when they’re at their jobs as well. Sometimes, behavior like this is a positive, but for the most part, these people are just assholes.
The people in the third group put optimization ahead of speed (no, they are not synonymous). Strong process skills are terrific and can add great value to a team. In heavy traffic or with big workloads, however, these people can often get paralyzed though.
The second group is the most problematic for me. These people usually aren’t particularly aggressive or driven – attributes of almost anyone I like to hire. On the other hand, there are clear places for such people. Think customer-facing roles.
The first group represents the crowd behavior I like to see. Aggressive without being an asshole about it. These are people who can keep the noise going on around them in their peripheral vision in order to get things done. They move quickly, but not recklessly. For these people, moving forward is often the most important thing on their mind.
OK, I’m biased. The real point here is that people’s behavior – in this case, how they work in a crowd – is strongly indicative of how they will work when they’re your employee. Notice the small stuff like this and you’ll get that gut feel you need to hire the right person.
March 8th, 2010 | |
 A few weeks ago, I ran across a box full of photos I had taken a while back. Actually, they were color slides, which should give you some idea of how old they are. Many of them were of people, events and even documents (photos of documents? Don’t even ask, I can’t remember why) from my second startup (actually, my third, but it was the second one I founded). The company was originally named Qualogy Technology, but wiser minds prevailed and it was later changed to Viewlogic Systems.
Viewlogic/Qualogy was started by a gang of five (including me) out of Digital Equipment Corporation. We worked for a full year refining the idea, testing the market and looking for money before we finally got funded. We knocked on many doors, gave fewer presentations, discussed our plan with even fewer semi-interested VCs and seriously talked with only a handful of potential investors. We rewrote the business plan so many times, I think I had every word memorized. We changed our revenue model, sales model, marketing plan and development schedule, but never changed our fundamental idea. We stuck with it because we believed in what we were doing and always thought that we could convince someone with money that we and our ideas were worthy of investment.
After a full year of effort, we finally beat someone into submission found an investor who believed in us and our plan. What did that initial deal entail? A total investment of only $50K (see the checks above – $25K from two VCs). My friend Dave points out that it amounts to a little over $100K in today’s dollars – not much money. In retrospect, the term sheet was crappy – contingencies, ratchets, board control issues and so forth. But none of that really mattered, we were on our way. If we had to make some additional sacrifices to be successful, they were acceptable. It was all about having the opportunity to execute our dream.
In the end, it worked out pretty well for all concerned. While not an insane, Harvard Business Review case study, cover of the Wall Street Journal, blowout success, the company did pretty well. Viewlogic went public and then sold a few years later for a little over half a billion dollars. Before it sold, it employed about 750 people, had direct sales worldwide and roughly $170M in revenue.
These days, I see startups often putting in even a greater levels of effort and dedication than we did in forming Viewlogic. The focus and intensity of these young companies is really outstanding. Frequently, though, I see a do or die mentality when it comes to getting funded at relatively high levels. Entrepreneurs think of big funding events as milestones and measurements of success instead of just being part of the process of initially refining and focusing their ideas and later growing them. Funding shouldn’t be the goal, it should be an accelerant to help a company achieve its real goals.
With that in mind, young companies should always look for alternatives to the classic substantial (relatively speaking) first round. Can they self fund? Can they get to positive cash flow earlier? Can they do some custom projects (adaptations of the company’s product or service) for specific early adopters? Can they simply take less money to bridge them to more success and further funding down the road?
Don’t get me wrong, time is against almost every company. Getting things done faster is important and having money to spend makes that much easier. Starting on a shoestring, with less money, or even no money, doesn’t prevent success, though. And, sometimes, it can even enhance it. It’s worked before.
March 1st, 2010 | |
37 medals, count ‘em. More than the US has ever won in the Winter Olympics (the previous US record was 34 in 2002 in Salt Lake); the first time the country has won the medal count since 1932 in Lake Placid; and more medals than any other country in the history of the event (Germany won 36, also in 2002). It’s sports. There are winners and losers. That’s the way it works. The US won. Celebrate it, America, you deserve to.
Americans are a funny bunch. For the most part, we want to obnoxiously demonstrate our leadership and strength, but in the end, we spend more time questioning and even regretting our exercise of the same than we do celebrating our success – any success. It seems that as a nation, we’re stuck between the polar extremes of being the ugly Americans and being the most stoic, self-deprecating, politically correct, wussiest humans to walk the planet.
The litany of commentary – both print and digital – discounting the performance of the US Olympic Team at the 2010 Winter Olympics is shocking and disappointing to me. Why is the US so afraid of admitting to itself that it won these Games? It’s not like we would be declaring world domination in sports or anything like that. The timers reported and the judges declared that the American athletes were better in more of the individual events than any other country during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Isn’t that simply the fact?
Speaking of facts . . . for those in the US who feel the need to downplay the US victory, here’s an arrow for your quiver. According to nationmaster.com, little Norway has kicked our ass in the Winter Olympics, as well as everyone else’s, during the history of the Winter event. The US isn’t close to being the all-time leader in the Games. Now do you feel like you can celebrate a little more? We’re not dominant. In fact, for most of the years that the Winter Olympics have run, the US medal count was only in the single digits.
I think the problem here is that we believe that the correct behavior for the world leader is one of introspection and humility. We’re afraid that if we show hubris, other countries will look down on us as not acting appropriately or as a leader should. While I question whether or not anyone should look at things that way and, for the most part, don’t really support it, I certainly understand the position and concern. I believe, however, that this neglects an internal need for certain behaviors. A need that is stronger now than it has been in over a century in this country.
Americans need to celebrate who we are and what we do. Most Americans barely know how the country leads in many scientific endeavors, in entrepreneurialism, in giving aide to foreign countries. These, of course, are the important things to celebrate, but they’re not visible. For some reason, the governing bodies of the US choose not to make a big deal of them – to make Americans feel proud of what they do. Any CEO worth his or her salt knows the value of helping their employees feel great about what they do. The tangible and intangible benefits are profound. The same thing needs to be done for the citizens of a country.
While sports are clearly less noble than other endeavors, they are visible to all and almost always black and white in terms of success and failure. They are a great tool for creating and celebrating success, especially when the stage is a worldwide one. We should use this year’s victory in the Olympics as a platform to declare success for Americans – admittedly, a minor one – to help us feel good about a real achievement. This is about celebrating within the country, not about bragging outside of it.
Before you blow me off here, let me give you two thoughts. We seemed to have no trouble accepting that the success in this year’s Super Bowl of the New Orleans Saints would be a good thing for the city of New Orleans, right? That one’s easy. No one is afraid of pissing off Indianapolis (the Indianapolis Colts lost in teh Super Bowl) residents by celebrating the success of another city in sports. Is there a reason that winning the Olympics is any different? And to those who are fixated on the idea that countries shouldn’t celebrate the success of sports teams, I ask you to look at the World Cup (soccer). If you want to see patriotic declarations of success that dwarf anything America could possible demonstrate, check out how European and South American countries celebrate when they beat other countries in World Cup games. Whew!
Sorry, I know this is a rant and a long one at that, but while I’m on a roll here, I’d like to rebut various arguments discounting America’s victory at the 2010 Olympic Games.
- While the US won the most medals, it did not win the most gold medals and gold medals are what really count. First, let me congratulate the Canadians who, with 14 gold medals, dominated the top tier of the podium more often than any other country. Second, the number of golds is not a good indicator of the best team at the Olympics, it is most often a better indicator of the team with the greatest genetic anomalies, seriously. If you look at medal counts over the vast majority of previous Olympics, it’s easy to see that a single athlete is the cause of a high number of gold medal wins. Think Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt in the last summer Olympics. It’s simply not a good indicator of team performance.
- The US only wins because of events created since 1990. Yes, it’s true that Americans have tended to be better at the higher risk sports added to the Games since the early 90’s. At least up until this winter’s Games. In this year’s games, Australians, Chinese, German, Norwegian, Belarus and certainly Canadian athletes often outperformed the Americans. In fact, the reason the Americans won the Olympics is more because of their performance in classic alpine events and even in some nordic events that have been in the games from the beginning.
- The US does better in judged events (figure skating, half-pipe, freestyle skiing, etc.) than it does in strictly timed events (slolom, super-G, speed skating, etc.). Statistically this has been true, historically. Most US medals in the past have been in skating and most of those in figure skating. But what does this statement imply – that judged events are somehow invalid and shouldn’t be part of the Olympics? Should style and athleticism not be part of the Olympics? Whatever your take on that question, it is part of the Games. The fact that the US wins its fair share of those events shouldn’t discount the country’s overall achievement.
- The US Olympic team is larger than most other teams and has an unfair advantage. If a country sends a huge number of non-competitive athletes, does it affect the number of medals it gets? There is almost no effect. One country having more athletes does not keep another country from having more. A country enters its best athletes in an event. If the country doesn’t have a competitive entry, fewer athletes are entered. Simple as that. There is no penalty for having either more qualified athletes or more unqualified ones, it just makes sense to only bring qualified ones and the US has more than many countries. The only potential advantage for a country with more athletes is that when an injury occurs, they are more likely to still be in a position to take a medal in an event. That only happens, of course, of when the replacement athlete is qualified enough to win.
I could go on and on. They’re simply reasons to take a victory and discount it to make it modestly meaningless. We don’t have to be assholes to celebrate and there is huge upside to celebrating successes, even ones this trivial.
Just one final thought. For those of you still desperate to somehow discredit the US victory at the Olympics here’s a reasonable, IMO, way of doing it. One can argue that the only appropriate measure of success at the Games is the number of medals won per capita – that is, the number of medals won in relation to the number of citizens of the country winning them. Let’s face it, at the level of athleticism required to be the world’s best in any sport, the size of the genetic pool is really a factor. With that in mind and, again according to nationmaster.com, Liechtenstein is far more successful at the Winter Olympics over time than any other nation on the planet. The US falls to 17th place. There you go. We suck after all.
February 25th, 2010 | |
Don’t even get me started about the sorry state of American technological and economic competitiveness and our complete ignorance of what really made the US a great and growing country since it’s inception. We are so caught up with balancing what is politically correct, what is politically achievable and not disrupting paths to reelection that we have forgotten what it’s like to have dreams and to work towards a significantly better or, at least different, future. Because we, as a nation, are so stuck dealing with the present, we have found ourselves mired in a tar pit of legislative nonsense that is slowly killing our chances to be competitive with the rapidly expanding world around us. And yes, being economically competitive is, in fact, necessary if we want to maintain our current societal dreams and values.
Because of the work of a variety of smart and dedicated people, including Paul Graham and my good friend, Brad Feld, one small, but critical cog in the complex machine of government regulation has been given a chance to turn. Yesterday, Senators John Kerry (D) and Richard Luger (R), the two ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed legislation to create a Startup Visa. Simply put, anyone from anywhere who starts a company in the US and is able to reasonably capitalize it can get a visa to stay in this country to develop their business here, on American soil with American employees, paying American taxes. That’s a no-brainer you say? You might be surprised to learn that the country is routinely kicking entrepreneurs out, telling them to start their businesses elsewhere.
These aren’t people who are taking away American jobs. They’re entrepreneurs – people who are creating new technologies, services, products and . . . wait for it . . . jobs. It’s a meritocracy, folks, the best stuff wins. Anyone is allowed to play. That is, for now, if you live here.
The new legislation is supported with over 100 signatures from leading venture capitalists and angel investors throughout the country. I’m honored that my name is included on the list. Not because I’m an investor looking for more deals, but I’m an American with an insanely strong desire to see this country continue to set the pace for the rest of the world when it comes to opportunity and leadership. Relatively speaking, the streets of the US are, in fact, paved with gold. I’d like to see us keep it that way and to provide opportunities for even more Americans to be able to mine it.
BTW, if you want to poke at Congress and have your voice heard on the issue, please yell and scream through your favorite channel or feel free to tweet congress using the Capitol-Dome shaped widget on the left of the page.
February 22nd, 2010 | |
OK, maybe not every company. Raw startups – two people in a garage kinda thing – shouldn’t waste their time with anything formal. But young companies – those that are established and on their way, regardless of their size or level of funding should, as should any company more established than that. It seems that we frequently relate having a board of directors to some kind of funding event. Of course, it often happens that way. Investors require one or more board seats, which becomes the impetus for creating a formal board – at least one with non-employees on it. But even without funding, companies should establish and use a board of directors made up of people from inside and outside the company. A board of qualified people can offer great benefits to a company, its management and its founders.
To me, the most important of these is that board members, unlike informal outside advisors, have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and, therefore, offer advice that is often better thought out and more responsible. After all, it’s their job. Additionally, because there is greater long term continuity with board members than other advisors, the input received from directors tends to be more specific, context sensitive and applicable to the company’s long term strategy. Finally, a board tuned in to what the company is doing and how it is doing it can provide dynamic guidance, including a kick in the ass now and then, that advisors without an ongoing, interactive relationship with the company are unable to deliver.
To some new company founders, these advantages may seem to be a bit abstract. In fact, lately, I’ve seen some resistance to the concept of establishing a board of directors entirely. From what I observe, this seems to be primarily driven by three factors:
- Fear that creating a formal board will somehow turn control of their baby to their new “boss”
- Reluctance to “spend” the equity necessary to recruit and retain quality board members
- Belief that they already have advisors who deliver all the guidance they need
Yes, there have been cases where boards have fired CEOs or somehow otherwise wrested control of the company from its leader or founder. I’ve certainly never seen this type of thing from non-investor board members and even with board members who are investors, it’s incredibly rare and definitely a last resort type of move. Virtually no one outside wants your job. If they did, they’d just go start another company or take their money to another playground.
Yes, you will have to compensate outside, non-investor, board members. Don’t be cheap. The compensation will be with equity, likely a single percentage point or lower and vesting over four years. What you will get in return will likely help you immeasurably. It may not be the sole difference between long-term success and short term failure (it might), but the advice you get will at the very least make your life easier and substantially increase your odds for success.
Finally, and I sorta hit on this earlier, having many advisors and mentors is terrific. You shouldn’t have fewer of these when you establish a board – they are always valuable. They do not, however, take the place of a dedicated group of individuals who have committed their efforts and wisdom to the success of the fledgling enterprise. Outside advisors will never have the volume of background data that your directors have to analyze situations nor will they feel the responsibility to do the right thing. Directors are tied to the company’s success and failure. Advisors and mentors are not. There’s a huge difference in responsibility and, ultimately, quality of action.
So there you have it. Do you still have a reasonable excuse for why you shouldn’t establish a board? If so, I’d like to hear it. “It’s hard,” by the way, doesn’t count. You’re an entrepreneur, just work harder and smarter to get it done.
February 10th, 2010 | |
It’s difficult not to respect all that Apple has achieved both as a computer company and as a consumer electronics crack dealer. They have great products and hugely loyal fans customers. Their terrific execution has allowed them to buck the trend of openness by providing what a wide swath of consumers want – a solution that, more often than many others, just works and looks great doing it. Part of the reason that the company has been able to do this is that they haven’t gone it alone. Apple moved from completely proprietary hardware and operating systems to defacto standards (at least at their core, adopting Intel processors and Unix); Parallels/VMWare have opened the Mac up to popular Windows apps; Firefox is the Mac’s primary window to the web world; Adobe, makes sure that Macs have access to the most widely used document and photo formats; and Google inclusion makes sure that Mac users have top notch access to the search giant’s internet tentacles. Apple has wisely leveraged what’s available in the market so they don’t have to take on the entire world at once.
But not so much anymore. It seems that Steve Jobs and Co. have expanded their battlefield beyond just Redmond to the folks at Adobe (Flash, who needs it? Acrobat, we can do that, Lightroom, nah, we have Aperture), Intel (through Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi), Amazon (eBooks, iTunes) and, especially, Google. That’s a lot of fronts to do battle on. Good, aggressive business practice . . . possibly. Hubris . . . likely. While small battles have been brewing for a while with Apple supplying applications that compete on the fringes with several of these players and some of these “partners” pushing onto Apple’s turf, there hasn’t previously been an all-out war. The question is, can Apple maintain its success going it alone? They’re going to have to if they’re going to “go to the mattresses” with all the big guys they have relied on in the past.
A big test will happen this year with tablets. The iPad (the iPhone XXL), will have to rely on the strength of its base of iPhone apps to differentiate it as we will be deluged with a tidal wave of new tablet offerings from a variety of vendors. We’ll see multiple operating systems housed in hardware taking many shapes and forms. Some of these will be strongly supported by Google and will leverage a broad array of Google services, technologies and overall openness. Some will leverage the economies of scale of large PC production to create lower cost offerings with more features. It’ll also be interesting to see what Amazon does at it defends its ebook turf.
I’m by no means saying that the king is going to be dethroned anytime soon, but I do believe that it’s one thing to flank your competition by being different and another to attack frontally going it alone. As a consumer of all the crap these guys produce, I’m loving sitting on the sidelines watching this melee. In the end, it’ll just mean that I get more, better toys. To that end, I’m fully in Apple’s corner for once.
February 1st, 2010 | |
Being a software guy myself, I often find that I dig a little deeper into the successes and failures of the software-oriented startups that I work with than I do with the non-software oriented ones. When I do, I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, although I routinely am, at how often I come across some very consistent and basic technical errors that are made by these companies. Chief among these is the lack of thorough thinking about the architecture of the end product prior to the start of coding. It’s, of course, natural to start hammering out code as fast as possible in order to get a product to market but, inevitably, the Piper needs to get paid and fundamental problems with the architecture will eventually require a wide-spread rewrite of the system or, even worse, will be a serious resource drain and time sink to in every future release.
You’ve probably read dozens of books that have discussed the importance and value of planning and how time spent in architecting a system is a drop in the bucket compared to the time it saves on the back end. I neither have the skills nor the eloquence to drive that point home any better. What I’d like to do, though, is to present a high-level view of how you might think about the architecture of your product so that it provides a framework for you to make rapid changes to the application and makes it easy for others (partners, customers, etc.) to extend the product in ways you may not have considered.
There is nothing revolutionary here. Let’s just call it a reminder that you will end up rewriting your application or, at least, its framework, in the future if you don’t adopt something like this early on. You may not see it yet, but like I’ve already said, that rewrite is going to be very expensive and painful and will ultimately cost you customers, competitive advantage and money.
The idea here is that there are are two programming interfaces. One separating you’re application from your core libraries or base layer of functions and another separating your application, as well as the lower-level programming interface from the outside world. The lower level, base programming interface, allows you to build an application virtually independent of the core functionality of the end product. Architected this way, you can build and test the application and the base code separately and make incremental changes to each part far easier. In fact, one can be changed without affecting the other as long as the base programming interface remains the same (it needs to be well thought out to start with, of course).
The higher-level programming interface gives you the power to add functionality to your product quickly, using the code in the base programming interface as well as code in the application layer. Using the application programming interface, you can prototype new functions rapidly and get quick fixes for bugs to users faster. Perhaps even more importantly, it enables easy access to most of the guts of your system to partners and customers so that they can extend it as they see fit. This access can be provided without having to publish hooks to the internals of your core system and exposing a boatload of potential problems that foreign calls to those components can create. If you’d like, though, you can also expose some of that base functionality to the high-level API as is shown in the “optional” architecture slice in the image above.
Simple, yes. It requires more work up front – both in planning and in coding – but with such an architecture, you’ll be able to roll out new functionality quickly and to fix mistakes as fast as you find them (well, almost). Ultimately, you’ll get the functionality your customers want into their hands faster than if you hadn’t adopted such a system. You’ll also be able to continue to roll out enhanced and improved functionality without getting bogged down with thinking about an architecture rewrite or with a huge backlog of nasty bug fixes.
The anxiety about getting your product to market will lead you to think that hacking together a system and refining it later is the way to go. Virtually always, this is a mistake. Speed is of the essence, but only the speed which you can deliver sustainable, quality product that continuously stays ahead of the competition. Look before you leap, it’ll make life so much easier.
January 24th, 2010 | |
 A few days after my wife and I recently celebrated our 21st anniversary we spent about a week in the Dominican Republic with our kids and some friends. One night, I found myself mesmerized by this fountain (blurry picture above). As I sat with a drink in hand staring at it, I was spellbound with . . . how it worked.
With the streams so consistent in volume, arc and distance, I pondered if there are separate pumps for each stream. Or, perhaps, there is a single pump for the entire fountain with the diameter of the piping varying to control the water pressure at each nozzle. Or, maybe even, there is some air-pressure system that regulates each stream to guarantee all are consistent.
As I was deep in thought considering this critical-to-the-state-of-the-planet problem, my wonderful wife joined me and said, “this fountain is beautiful, isn’t it?” I responded with an answer directly out of the well–trained husband handbook, “yes it is, that’s what I was just thinking.” In a sense, this was completely true. I just saw the beauty of the fountain in a different way.
I spent the rest of the evening thinking about how lucky I am. I love the fact that my wife and I have different, but very compatible perspectives on things. She, of course, rolled her eyes when I explained how I was thinking about it, but she was more than happy to have us both enjoying the view of the fountain each in our own way. Me too. Turns out our entire relationship works that way. Different views of life that the other appreciates and respects. A key to marital bliss? Who knows, but it works for us.
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