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Justin and Jason discuss Apple’s cloud strategy, RDBHost, the power law, whether it’s better to compete in an existing market or create a new one, why entrepreneurs need to be resilient but not obstinate, the current status of AppIgnite, the efficiency of short coding sessions, solving problems in your sleep, why Stephen Hawking thinks it’s unwise to attempt to contact alien civilizations, keeping your tests up to date, and how working on something interesting makes it easier to overcome the difficult parts.
Woah! Jason vs. Justin, who’s going to win the Apple Paradigm Shift argument. Queensbury Rules please gentlemen.
Anyway, another RDBHost alternative/competitor might be of interest for David: http://www.clustrix.com
Justin, are you coding Swarm for the iPad in Titanium? How are you finding it?
I think that iPad may do for computing what iPhone did for phones. Note that iPhone jump started an existing market. Is iPad the future of computing? I don’t think its form factor works for me all the time but with the right accessories, sure I could see a couple of them around my house.
“Cloud” on the other hand, is here to stay. I love it. I recover from hardware failures without skipping a beat.
As far as I know, the only way you can protect Swarm is to *patent* it. Copyright won’t do. You better get that patent application going if you want to protect it. I suggest you do. A prelim application is cheaper than a full application. If you make 30 billion dollars, then you can get the full patent. Talk to a lawyer. Yesterday.
Backgrounding… Jason, you sound like my wife! HAHAHAHAHA! Jason is right about one thing though: geeks sound awful on demo videos. Justin is lucky because he has an intelligent sounding accent. I sound like a goof.
I think Jason is very lucky to have that guy come over and work on the product with him. He is smart enough to take advantage. This is exactly the suggested product development pattern in “Crossing the Chasm”.
Justin is a flip flopper! Jason should buy him flip flops and cake for Christmas.
@Charlie Irish Queensbury Rules – that’s hilarious! 😉 I had never even heard of them before, but thanks to you and Wikipedia I am thus enlightened. Yeah, I guess we got a little into it this show, but in fact Justin edited out the part where he said he was going to punch me in the face. 😉
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh Yeah, having Mark sit down next to me while I write the code for the iPhone app really speeds things along, and besides it’s more fun that way. Also, as you may have noticed from listening to the show – I kind of like to talk. 😉
You’re right! Justin is a flip flopper! And I really like this idea of buying him some flip flops.
Woah. Guys. Chiiiiilll oooouutttt! Did you kiss and make up after this show? Did you both get out the wrong side of the bed that morning?
@Big Al Sorry about that. The disagreement escalated more than it should have.
Hello, Chris Williams here. Was quite a surprise to hear my name mentioned whilst listening to the podcast.
Apologises for not wording my question better. I have just read an article titled “Why and How: Ruby (and Rails) Unit Testing” to get a bit of an overview of how RoR deals with unit-testing. Here is my attempt to rephrase the problem.
I create a model.
I create a test for the model.
I alter the model
The test still passes, but because the test was to general a bug has crept into my code.
My question should have been, based on the above situation, do we have any patterns to tackle this. My current thinking is probably overly complicated and is half built and it involves keeping track of hash files of the “test file” and the “file to be tested”. Which then alerts me to the fact the file has been changed and I should review the test file. Clearly its an edge case, but after going to all this effort to write tests, its worth knowing. AND yes, I have concluded I have spent far too much time on tests and less time on the project.
Hopefully that clarifies my question and maybe somebody will say “X” does it this way and its how you should do it.
Show was good, cant help feeling Justin has gotten hooked on “macs” after getting his new machine. I did find myself chuckling this morning walking to work hearing you guys chatting about “Steve Jobs”.
Do you guys have any plans for week 52 ( the year ), which happens at the end of June?
@Jason Just poking fun Jason 😉
The initial Apple “discussion” seemed to set the tone for the rest of the show, you guys were quite abrasive all the way through. I probably fall on Jason’s side of this one, the Ipad is just a big iphone but less portable, but as a board game platform I think you might be targeting an excellent use case for having one over an iphone.
I have finally got around to getting Gladwell’s Outliers, after all the references you give to outliers I thought it about time I read it. I also bought Edward De Bono’s Thinking Course, which is very interesting.
Hi guys. I have to say your first segment made me laugh as I was starting a hike by my house. This reminded me of some of the debates and discussions we have in mediterranean countries like France, Italy, Spain or Greece. It’s totally ok to argue among friends! 🙂
I have to say I felt leaning towards Jason’s side but barely. The iPad is cool but hardly the first tablet ever created. It probably needs to become more rugged and able to survive somewhat rough handling to become a winner. Otherwise “over the broken toy many fans cry they will” (dixit my friend Yoda). I think that the game changer for a developer and designer is the touch interface (at a bigger scale than a phone). We definitely need to develop these skills.
I enjoyed La Critique as this reminded me of the progress I still need to make.
David K., hang in there, like Jason said, the fact that you released your app is a major step. And like most guests on the show have already said, it can take a couple years to get your app where you really need it to be.
Something which I still find challenging is to partner with a designer all while boostrapping. I know that in my professional experience working with a new designer always takes a fair amount of time. For my own personal app (www.myskillsmap.com), although I have a designer friend, she is very busy, so I have not been able to make as much progress as I wanted. I am thinking of trying out design freelance sites like ODesk, DesignCrowd, and Sortfolio. Do you have any recommendations and or other ideas to help pair up developers and designers?
For those leaning Jason’s way, check out these articles 🙂 http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2010/05/what-ipads-did-to-my-family.html http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176435/Netbooks_Ha_iPads_will_replace_desktop_PCs?taxonomyId=66
[off topic] A few episodes ago you guys were discussing the value VC funding vs. shoe-string-ing when starting-up a new product. Spolsky said this in an interview here, the thought was new to me, what do you guys think?
Joel: …the whole point of VC is to defer thinking about profit until a large number of people are getting value out of the site, after which it should be easy to find ways to monetize that benefit both sides… things like careers.stackoverflow.com
Just wanted to say hi, and I Love the show! Got me thinking, got me excited. Looking forward to next episode.
@Taylor Norrish Hey, thanks for the positive feedback! Likewise, I’m a big fan of PrintFriendly and use it everyday. We still need to get you on the show. Send me an email.
Guys, really great show. Any plans to get Patrick McKenzie on? I think he would make a wonderful guest. When it comes to startups, he really knows his onions.
@soitgoes Yeah, I had thought of inviting him on the show a while back, but since he was just interviewed by Andrew Warner on Mixergy it might make sense to let a little time go by. I’d hate to just do a repeat of the Mixergy show.
@Jason. Yes, that’s a good point. I think in a few months time it may be worth doing though as Patrick has just launched a new product so there will be lots of interesting stories from that no doubt.
Jason : Actually now might be the perfect time to interview him. He has just released his second product to beta testing and gone public with it.
He did this after the mixergy interview. See this link :
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.816849.5