techZING! 3 – Source Control… What’s Source Control?

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QueryCell, mISV Marketing, Delphi, VB6, Partners Buy In, Balsamiq, Business Morals, John Carmack, QuakeCon, Semantic Web, Python Drama, Version Control, Tortoise SVN, Beanstalk, Facebook’s Future

• Justin found our guest Sam Howley by posting an open invitation on the Joel on Software forum. Sam is located in Australia and is the creator of QueryCell, an Excel add-in that provides the ability to write and execute SQL queries on spreadsheet table data. He also recently released a product called Quiz Night Chief.
• Sam says that while QueryCell was only just released three weeks ago, he already has customers. He cites the rule that things will take longer than you expect, even when you take that rule into account. He believes that this principle can be extended to marketing, as in – marketing will be more important than you think even when you take that into account. He says that it was a week before he got his first customer at which point he and his girlfriend celebrated and went out to dinner.
• Justin expects that there will be a lot of people who will have the pain that QueryCell relieves, but wonders how you might find and market to those people. Sam explains the difficulty in marketing to a non-technical customer base as they often don’t hang out all in one place.
• Sam talks about Delphi, the platform in which he wrote QueryCell. Jason compared VB6 to Delphi and describes how much more productive it was for him to write Windows apps using VB6 than Visual C++, which he used in the 90s.
• Sam talks a little bit about how he learned to write code and how he got into software development.
• Sam discusses the market for Quiz Night Chief and the problem it solves.
• Jason talks about the importance of having the support of significant others when pursing entrepreneurial ventures.
• Sam says that he has products number three and four in the works and Justin discuses the difficulty of keeping yourself from being distracted by new projects and ideas. Justin posts all of his new software ideas on the web (giving them away for free) so that he won’t think about them anymore. Justin argues for not hedging and for focusing your energy on a single product as Peldi Guilizzoni did with Balsamiq, which grossed over 200K in its first year.
• Sam wants to build software that will make the world a better place. Justin worries about the moral implications of building a company that competes with and potentially ruins competitors. Justin doesn’t want to be a meanie. Jason believes that competition is a necessary ingredient for innovation which net-net is an overall positive for more people.
• Sam found John Carmack‘s keynote speeches at QuakeCon to be fascinating.
• Justin mentions Tim Berners-Lee’s talk at TedTalks on the next web. He thought it was cool.  Sam and Jason aren’t convinced and agree with Peter Norvig that the semantic web will remain the future of the web for some time.
• Sam brings up the brouhaha that resulted from Guido van Rossum‘s unwillingness to support tail recursion in Python.
• Jason jokes about how his method of version control is to simply to copy the source directory to a backup directory organized by date. Justin is shocked at Jason’s brazen apostasy and launches into an extended rant about the importance of version control and specifically advocates the use of tools like Tortoise SVN and Beanstalk (for subversion hosting). Sam at first jokes that he may not be able to talk to Jason any longer since he doesn’t use GIT (because that’s what the cool kids use), but then admits that he doesn’t use version control either since, like Jason, he’s a lone developer.
• Sam prophecizes that Facebook will have disappeared (or at least not be very important) 10 years from now, but that Google will be still be a force. Jason agrees because he believes Facebook is just a trendy service like Friendster and MySpace.
• Jason discusses the current status of Preezo and it’s possible future.