Sami Dalouche

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).

I came across a few very interesting set of “lessons learnt from my start-up” articles. (thanks Mathieu, Joel for the references) :

• Lessons learnt from Devver.net
• Startup lessons learnt from Warren Buffer
• My co-founder took my company and my girlfriend

There are many benefits to having a distributed team, but two stood out in our experience. First, we could hire top talent without having to worry about location (in fact, our flexibility regarding location was very attractive to most candidates we interviewed). Secondly, being in different locations allowed every team member to work with minimal distractions, which is invaluable when it comes to efficiently writing good code.

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We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett excerpted in “Startup lessons learned from Warren Buffett” [thx Derick]

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And yes, a partnership is never really equal.  There has to be someone who is somewhat more equal than others. There is nothing more devastating than a partnership were all the members have exactly equal rights and votes. This just does not work. Human society and all monkeys always have a single individual at the top  and with all others, even though they are almost equal, being not quite equal.

Slashoid has been launched less than a week ago, and more than 30 scoops have already been published. The current feedback includes :

• Too much clutter before being able to publish a scoop (tags, ..)
• Article publishing date/time does not work correctly
• Impossible to delete scoops

These issues are all related to Drigg/Drupal, but we will take a look at them whenever we get some time, to check wether things can be easily fixed.

Why Mark Suster is wrong about not hiring job hoppers

So who in the hell should you hire? Hire the best. Hire people that can leave your startup at any minute if they wanted to because they’re so kick ass that they’re constantly getting contacted by interested parties. Then it becomes your job to ensure that you’re creating an environment that is equally as good as your people. Create a company that gives your people the most room for growth, creativity, a sense of ownership, and fun. And if you can’t hire the best then hire people with any level of experience (novice, intermediate, advanced) that have promise. Then help them become the best so that they can leave any time they want. Hint: they won’t. They’ll be loyal because you helped them become the best. Your goal should be to help every single employee get to the point where they’re the best in their field and are constantly getting job offers.