Sami Dalouche

Incubators are looking for ways to differentiate themselves. The newly launched AngelPad (an incubator created by 7 ex-googlers), for instance, bets on recreating a google-like atmosphere to foster innovation.

A recent post from Mark Shuttleworth seems to show that some foundations also have interesting ideas when it comes to financing projects :

“The model of the Foundation is unusual: we identify interesting change agents, like Mark, who are articulating powerful ideas that seem like the offer a hint of the future, and we fund them to work on those for a year. We also offer them an investment multiplier: if they put their personal money into a project, we multiply that by 10x or more, up to a maximum amount. In short, find good people, back them when they put skin in the game.”

Now, I am wondering about something : could incubators be a model for managing companies ?

• What would happen if you created a company that was merely a kind of aggregate of smaller companies sharing a common vision but running mostly independantly ?
• Could the Politics of Switzerland be an inspiration  for creating such an ecosystem ?
• How much federal government do you need to have inside a company to have the perfect balance between “feeling like a single company” and “feeling empowered enough to do things without any bureaucracy” ? (do-ers hate bureaucracy, so if you want doers in your company, you’d better find a way to systematically fight it if you want to keep these people)
• Is is possible for people to feel part of their community without neglecting the rest of the ecosystem, the same way Texas inhabitants feel both texan and american ?  (Have you noticed that people have both the texan flag and the american one in their garden over there ?)

See Enough is enough: disinfecting OSM from poisonous people.

“I used to write the code, own the domain names, run the mailing list(s), run the servers, evangelize, talk to the press and so on. I’ve successively and successfully given up those rights to very capable individuals. However this has led to a power vacuum when it comes to making some key decisions because nobody, for example and in a sense, is “in charge” of everything. For the most part I’ve enjoyed giving up control and seeing the project blossom, because it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t.”

InfoQ runs a very interesting video of Jim Coplien about Data-Context Interaction.

“Uncle bob completly misses the point by assuming that professionalism is about doing TDD”.

“Dynamic languages got popular for the wrong reasons

“people get religious about details that don’t matter, and very very few people are talking about the big picture”

“scrum is all about common sense, but common sense is really uncommon”

“teams are effective, and to be effective they have to be small. 3 is better than 5″

Code Anthem’s Law :

The less the median developer on a software project team is paid, the more the project will cost to complete.

In the last VoxAgile episode, Christian Lapointe, Ernst Perpignand and Vincent Tence are having a discussion concerning the latest Scrum.org developer training.

Is that the solution to all the problems we are facing in the software industry ? Is a full week training going to change anything to the current situation ? The answer is clearly a big NO, but what I find extremely important with this new trend is that people are slowly realizing that if you want to develop software, you’d rather invest in your developers !

So long live to Scrum.org developer course, and let’s hope to see more initiatives like that!

Here is my selection of websites that are focusing on Android-related news :

1. Slashoid : Android news: stuff that matters
2. Phandroid: Android Phone Fans
3. Android Central : Android Central
4. MobileCrunch : Techcrunh’s mobile spin-off
5. mobile.slashdot.org : Slashdot’s mobile spin-off

Which ones do you often use ?

With a few people from Pyxis Tech, we launched Slashoid.org last month. The goal was to provide a community-driven website that provides Android news that matter : interesting and unpolluted scoops that prevent you, as a reader, from subscribing to dozen of RSS feeds just to be notified of anything that is worth it in the Android community.

After a month of activity, things seem to go well. We average something like 60 unique visitors and about 150 page views per day. This is a good start, and will continue to rise as we get some visibility (From a SEO point of view, we are practically invisible). Any idea on how to improve this ?

On Scrum cross-functional teams pinpoints the lack of a real flow in Scrum and its consequences

In Scrum, there is no mechanism to show the bottlenecks of a process. You can only see that the realization of a task takes a long time or that the task is blocked. You have no idea why or where it is stuck unless you ask the team members. The burndown chart doesn’t help in that matter, when there is a bottleneck you can see some bumps on the graphs but the chart doesn’t capture any information on where is the delay is coming from. “

I am proud to announce the availability of MFU (Multiple File Uploader) v0.1 . This is a small project that we developed with Florent Valdelievre.

If you are using the dojo toolkit and are looking for a clean, customizable file uploader, that works pretty much the same way as gmail file attachment mechanism (demo here), then please check it out !

The most important features include :

• Cross-browser compliance: MFU has been successfully tested on IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Moreover, it builds on top of dojo abstractions which provide a cross-browser compatiblity layer
• Ease of use: MFU either comes as an easy-to-use standalone, striped-down, optimized version, or as a module that can be plugged into any dojo-based application. MFU distribution comes bundled with a set of sample HTML/JavaScript templates as well as a sample PHP-based server-side implementation. See the Quickstart for more information.
• Customizable look: MFU takes advantage of dojo’s Template mechanism. As a matter of fact, the layout, links, and general appearance are completly configurable through an html template. This is particularly handy in situations where you need to customize MFU for your site’s look and feel.
• Internationalizable (i18n): All links and error messages take advantage of dojo’s internationalization support. You are more than welcome to fork the code on github to provide additional translations.
• Free Software: MFU is liberally dual-licensed under the New BSD license and the Academic Free License v2.1 (same license terms as dojo). Feel free to either contribute to or fork the source code on github

Please do not hesitate to drop me an email if you have trouble using MFU.

And of course, the project is hosted on github, so contributing is a breeze Just fork to provide additional code or translations, and we’ll be thrilled to include your enhancements in the next release.

Pretty good post from A. Skorkin.

BOZO Consulting

BOZO is a place with well-intentioned people who really want to please their clients. The only downside to BOZO is it doesn’t have the slightest clue about how to achieve that goal. BOZO says yes to everything: “Yes, of course we will cut the estimate.” “Yes, of course, we will lower our bill rate.” The idea is to get the deal at all costs. To summarize, BOZO has a sales-driven culture that lacks the ability to leverage any sort of delivery capability it accidentally hires (thought from Skorks: that would have to be one of the most buzzword driven sentences ever, how can we “leverage” that).