Monthly Archive for December, 2008

My theory about becoming rich

Published on December 23, 2008 in Business, Career Development and Observations from the Web. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been thinking about what money is, and have come to this conclusion…

There is no link between working hard and being rich.

This sounds like a crazy statement to say, but bear with me. I’ve known people that have worked hard all their life, and yet, still aren’t rich. So how do people get rich?

Well you need to look at what money represents. Money represents desire of the community. So if you have something that is highly desired by the community you’re in, then you’ll have a lot of money.

So let’s explore this. If you work for a fast food store hard, you’ll never be rich. Why? Because it doesn’t pay a lot. But why doesn’t it pay a lot? Because the work you’re doing isn’t unique, and doesn’t require highly innovative skills. And because anyone can do it, then you’re easily replaceable, and hence the community’s desire for you isn’t very high, and neither are your wages.

Now look at say an Internet Celebrity that is rich. Often they get rich because they featured in a meme, which is like something of interest in the internet, such as the Star Wars Kid. Memes reflect the desire of the community, which is people on the internet, who watch the video, and click on ads, and hence pay the people in the meme (sometimes). The people in the meme didn’t have to work hard all their life, they just had to have something highly desired to the community, which is their video for instance.

So if we take a peice of land and a house that’s worth $2 million dollars, then that’s something that has obvious value because it’s desired. People want land to live from, and a house to live in. And you can see the work (or effort) that went into that house.

But if the person who earned $2 million from a meme bought that house, you would have to ask, how is that fair? How does a person who made a video of themselves twirling around a stick equal all the hard work and effort that went into building a house, and purchasing the land?

Desire of the community.

So what does this all mean? If you want to be rich, you need to be dealing in things that are highly desired by the community you’re in. Diamonds are highly desired to wealthy people, and so if you have them you’re rich. Memes are highly desired in the Internet, so if you have them you’re rich. Food’s highly desired to people if they don’t have any, so if you have them you’re rich.

And so I’m focusing on creating software that’s highly desired to large enterprises. Software that will save them millions of dollars and man-hours. By focusing on this, I can sell that software for a large amount of money, regardless of the amount of hard work that went into the software.

The software is of course, Resourcer.

Resourcer User Stories

Published on December 7, 2008 in Development. Closed Tags: .

I’ve been hard at work writing Resourcer User Stories. I’ve come up with 85+ user stories, though a few are quite repetitive. I’ve been following the Head First Software Development book which comes highly recommended from me! It’s a great book, quite entertaining, and full of quizes, pictures, and thought-provoking elements that make you remember things, rather than just being another reference book on the shelf.

My favourite tip: Easy User Stories. A user story is:

One feature of the software that the user can understand. It should be less than three sentences in length, contain a title and description, and priority. It should take less than seven development days to implement.

That’s it. So simple. You can dress it up into a use case with alternate flows and exceptions, but really if you’re working in a small team like I am, user stories are more than enough. Do note some of the criteria of a user story:

  1. It is one feature. If your user story has an “and” or “or” in it, that’s more than one feature.
  2. The user can understand it. You can’t mention AJAX, since what does that mean to the end user. You could say it must look good and act like a desktop application not a webpage. You could say it needs a place to save data, or it must import users from another application. But you can’t say it it must have a MySQL backend or import users to an XML web service, unless your users understand this.
  3. It should be less than three sentences in length. How long does it take to describe one feature? If it’s going on and on, it’s probably more than one feature… Not too much detail here, it’s not a design document.
  4. It should take less than seven days to implement. Sounds difficult. If it’s bigger, cut it down. Cut it down. Cut it down. A user logging in could actually mean a user logging in by SAML or LDAP. Different features.

So why the focus on small features? Simple, easy to complete, easy to test, easy to demo, easy to get paid.

Programming for non-programmers

Published on December 7, 2008 in Development. Closed Tags: , , , .

My stumbling block for any of the ideas I have has always been programming. I’m generally not very good at it because I don’t like it, and I don’t like it because I’m not very good at it. So I’m always looking at methods to get around this. Coghead seems to be a pretty good example. However, I’m not really a fan of being locked into a platform like this. So instead, I’ve been looking at frameworks and what not that can help me.

The problem with straight PHP frameworks is that they’re generally quite complex, requiring me to learn an abstraction layer that makes my life more complex than just programming in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, the scaffolding in CakePHP is great. But once you’ve scaffolded, then what? Better jump into the API. And it’s not (or it is) as easy as it looks.

And so I’m trying to move up the value chain and realise, surely there’s someone smarter than me that has already invented better web controls than what I could do.

Enter some of these RIA frameworks. A couple I’m looking at are ZK and Laszlo. Some of the bigger name ones are Silverlight and Adobe AIR. I’m focusing on the ones that has the minimum amount of programming required to create Resourcer.

ZK has a really good Live Demo that comes as a WAR file that you’d deploy in a Web Container like Tomcat. Here are some more ZK Demos.

I’ll keep you in the loop with how it goes.