flowdelic

I got a big kick out this post by Kevin. I’ve been friends with Kevin a long time, and through discussions over lunch, coffee, or beers over several years I’ve watched him wrestle with issues about working and launching new companies in a super-networked world. The nature of doing business, especially in technology, is changing dramatically and it looks like Kevin is way ahead of the curve piecing the puzzle together. My discussions with him helped form the basis of my Master’s thesis (Learning from Open Source) but now he’s taking it to a new level. Kevin’s also written a new book, which he describes as a field manual for launching new ventures in a network economy. I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.

Man, you’d think from reading this post from Dave Winer that when I suggested over 10 years ago that UserLand Frontier would make a great scripting environment for the web, I somehow set into motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to his misery.

In 1995 or 1996 I got a prophetic email from Mason Hale, who had discovered Frontier and thought it would make a wonderful environment for CGI scripting. He was right, but I came to wish I had never gotten that email. Seriously.

While it is nice to be remembered, I wish it were a little more fondly. I hate to think Dave genuinely regrets our interaction and the cool things we built together or pushed each other to build back in the early years of the web. We did some crazy stuff. Some of which has faded to history, but I still remember well — and fondly. Like when we wired Frontier up to Netscape to run client-side scripts using a custom usrtlk: protocol. It was a security nightmare waiting to happen, but it was geeky-cool and a fun and still mostly uncharted territory to explore.

So it is a bit sad for me to read that Dave associates me and that time with a negative turning point in his life. I have not kept in touch with Dave over the years. We didn’t have a falling out or anything, we just started working on different things. I am thankful for the many lessons I learned from working with Dave Winer. I wish him well, and I am sorry to hear he’s had a rough stretch these last few years.

I received an email recently from my friend Stephen Dulaney reminding it was time for my annual post here on flowdelic. Stephen noticed that my previous two postings were made in March 2006 and March 2005. So to keep my one-post-per-year streak alive, just under the wire, here’s a quick update.

The biggest news is that I left my job as Chief Technologist at frog design in June 2006. I left to help start up a new company, LargeSmall Systems, with another friend, Matt Cohen. We are not quite ready to publicly disclose the nature of our business or product, but it has been a great ride so far. We’ve assembled a terrific team and together we are building some really cool technology. It’s been hard work, and a lot of fun at the same time. I’ll write more about this new venture in the future.

Leaving a comfortable position at frog for the relative uncertainty of a not-quite-yet-funded hatchling startup last year was a tough decision to make. Having gone through a boom and bust during my eight years at frog, the digital technology team I founded in 1998 was doing better than ever. We were doing great work and some strategic bets we had placed earlier were starting to pay off. Yet, I had the opportunity to do something new and exciting with this start-up. I was fortunate to be able to leave frog at the top of my game, so to speak, with my department growing and with strong leadership in place behind me to keep things rolling. For me, it was a textbook case of how to leave your job on good terms.

It’s been great to watch from sidelines, since I left, and see my old team continue to crank out great work and to establish themselves as leaders in some hot emerging technology areas. One example: a frog project I played a key role in early on, the Alltel Celltop, was recently awarded Best of Show at the CTIA Wireless industry conference. Another: the new Hawaiian Airlines website is gorgeous, highly-functional, and technologically sleek and elegant. I am bursting with pride.

While I would be enjoying a bit more glory about now had I stayed at frog, I don’t have any regrets. The last nine months have been intensive training for me in the starting, funding and growing of a company. For the first time in my life I am fully focused on creating a single product. It’s been an awesome experience and the future only looks brighter.

There have been some benefits to my personal life too. For one, my commute is now just under a mile. And while at frog I was a platinum-level frequent flyer, now I am closer to home and have been able to do things like coach my daughter’s soccer team — something I never would have been able to do with my previous travel schedule. I’m still working as hard as ever, yet I’ve also been able to spend more time with my family. And that has been priceless.

More to come…

I was a presenter at Microsoft’s Mix ‘06 conference, held in Las Vegas March 20-22. Videos of all the sessions (including mine) are now online. I presented with my frog design colleague, Nelan Schwartz. The title of our session was “Better Design, Built Faster: Using New UI Technologies to Speed Development.” Here’s the session description:

Achieving complete separation between visual design, content, and logic has long been the Holy Grail of the Web design world. By keeping these separate layers loosely-coupled, they can be developed and changed independently of one another, resulting in faster, more parallel development and more manageable code. That is the vision, but in practice, achieving truly clean separation has been easier said than done. New techniques with AJAX and CSS, and new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named “Avalon”), have made achieving the ideal of clean separation more attainable. This session dives into the experiences and lessons learned by Frog Design while using these techniques and technologies on real projects. We explore the impact (good and bad) on processes, collaboration, and efficiency.

As you can quickly deduce from the frequency of posts to this blog, I’ve been on a bit of a blogging hiatus for the past six months. I have a lot of other things competing for my attention, and keeping my blog updated is pretty far down my list of priorities. After having a blog for a bit, I naturally arrived at some ideas for making it better. And in a way these ideas have contributed to my laxity. I have a mental picture of my new blog (which is much improved) and so posting to this, my “old” blog, is now somehow a little less appealing than it was before. I feel like I need to do some renovation around here, but I just haven’t had enough free hours strung together to sit down and do it.

But in the last two weeks or so, I’ve had three separate people comment on the lack of posts to my blog. Two of these were strangers I had never met before, candidates interviewing for positions (by the way: frog is hiring) who had Googled my name prior to their interview. Knowing that some people are still reading these pages gives me motivation to tidy things and update a bit more frequently. Spring break is coming up, I’ve requested a few days of vacation, and we’ve farmed all three of our kids off to visit their grand parents. Colleen and I aren’t quite sure what we’ll do with ourselves, without having to shuttle kids around to school, baseball practice and birthday parties. So with any luck, I’ll squeeze in some time to work on flowdelic.

One other thorn in my side, that has soured me a bit to the whole idea of blogging is comment spam. I’ve got comment moderation turned on, and I’ve never let a spammy comment get through, yet I still get 50 or spam comments a week here. Continually having to delete advertisements for online pharamacies and poker sites (and worse) has made this a little more of chore and a bit less of a joy than I had hoped for.

Although I finished my master’s report nearly six months ago, I just now got around to publishing it here. I’ve distributed it to a few friends and colleagues, some of whom have asked to link to it. So here it is: Learning from Open Source. This version is slightly edited from the version I submitted to finish my master’s degree. For more about the topic, see My Thesis Topic.

I know that metereologically speaking, the current season is still Summer, but with three kids, for us, Summer effectively ends when the kids return to school. The first day back to school was last Tuesday. Our Summer ended in a whirlwind of activity. You wouldn’t know it looking at the blog postings here. It seems that for me at least, blog activity is inversely proportional to the amount of non-blog activity in my life. I wonder if this holds true for others in the blogosphere?

I finished my master’s report and have been awarded a Master of Science in Engineering (yipee!). The last few weeks of writing were an ordeal — many late nights, lots of coffee, lots of anxiety. I had planned to wrap up my paper early and head out for our annual family vacation to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast. Alas, I was not quite done when our departure day arrived (that last 10% is a bear) — and so I took my laptop (and my anxiety) with me and worked on my paper a few hours a day. It’s done now and I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. I’m going to do a little reformatting and give it another round of editing before posting it here.

Despite my paper ordeal, we managed to have an excellent vacation, I played some golf, took the boys fishing and worked on teaching our daughter to swim. She turned 3 at the coast, and we celebrated with a poolside birthday party. We made tie-die shirts, did the limbo and ate birthday cake and ice cream. As they say, “fun was had by all.”

No sooner had we returned from the coast than we dispatched our oldest son to two weeks of camp in the rolling green Texas hill country. He spent 16 hours a day outdoors doing things they do at camp: swimming, hiking, shooting, eating, singing and playing. He learned a new game, gaga, and made some new friends. When I first saw him, two Saturdays later, I was struck by how relaxed and confident he seemed. I was amazed how much my little boy had grown up in two short weeks. Instead of a homesick boy, here was this healthy, happy kid — glad to see me — but also a little sad to see his camp experience come to an end.

School started the Tuesday after we picked him up from camp — and now we are back to our usual school-year routine. The days at camp proved to be good training for waking early, and so getting to school by 7:30am was not as painful this year as in years past. I too am picking up a routine, one that, I hope, includes more frequent blog postings.

BusinessWeek covers the recent equity investment by Flextronics in frog.

Somewhere in my surfing today, I ran across a link to Scott Rosenburg’s post titled “Blogs, bosses and bucks.” This caught my eye, because in my thesis research, I’ve been thinking about the role money and power structures have on collaboration amongst virtual teams.

In my research, I’ve been studying successful “open” collaborative communities like the Apache Software Foundation and Wikipedia, looking for “new” practices that could be applied to help virtual teams be more successful in a corporate setting. But what I’ve found is that the practices used by these organizations have, for the most part, already been widely documented in business and academic literature. These include things like have a well-defined purpose, clearly defined roles and responsiblities, recognition of achievement, etc.

It is not that these groups are doing anything drastically different, yet it does appear to be the case that good management practices seem to occur more naturally in these contexts. Why? Ultimately, I think it ties back to two key things:

1. Volunteer organizations are easier to leave. Volunteers who lose interest in the project will simply move on to something else
2. Criticism and alternate ideas are freely shared, because no one is afraid of losing their jobs in retaliation

I’m sure there is more to than this, but these two factors play together as well to promote strong leadership. In these organizations, leaders emerge not because the wield the power to over someone else’s paycheck, but rather based on their ability to build consensus and the value their own contributions to the project. When leadership fails in an open organization, it is obvious if not immediate. Failing projects are identified by recurring flame wars and by an inability to keep a steady, stable group of contributors involved in the project.

My point is not that leaders in volunteer organizations are better than their corporate counterparts, but rather that the role of money can mask poor leadership in an organization. Is everyone involved because they want to be? Or are they just drawing paychecks until they can find a better position somewhere else? Is the lack of debate a sign of silent agreement or fear of retailiation?

To tie this back to Scott’s article — I agree that in many organizations, the fear of being fired is going to keep people from blogging. But I would also argue that creating an environment that punishes criticism and curbs open debate can also put a company at a distinct disadvantage.

I agree with Tim Bray’s statement that companies who don’t adopt blogging will be playing “catch-up” — not because blogging itself is inherently advantageous (though it may be), but because it is an outward symptom of a company that internally values open sharing of ideas and criticism.

Sorry for the lack of traffic here — it’s been a very busy month for me. At work, we’ve had several projects wrapping up and new ones kicking off. Still we found time to hold a 2-day technology summit in Austin. We brought everyone in my group together to talk strategy, discuss process, share best practices, and repeatedly hurl 14lb. balls at formations of wooden pins.

On the personal side of things, I’ve got less than 4 weeks to go to finish my thesis(!), so I’ve been spending any spare time on the weekends working on it. Finishing that paper is the most important thing I’ll do all year.

This weekend, I finally found time to spend on the blog. After making sure all my old links would still work, I removed the final remnants of MoveableType from the server. I’ve started on a new look and feel template, but won’t finish tonight. Maybe check back next month?