White Wall Web Wisdom » Developers Interest

Spread the feva with Flag Tags

Noel — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:15:05 +0000

Soccer Time – it is (certainly) here! We’re feeling it. We’re seeing it.

Buildings are decorated, streets bannered, cars socked and flagged and many faces are soon to be painted, but online? That place which holds so much of our attention? Not so much.

It’s time to fix that… it’s time to Spread The Feva!

We’ve created the perfect way to fast-track the release of pent-up patriotism by introducing The Flag Tag. With very little effort, you too can proudly sport the online equivalent of mirror-socks!

With a 1-line addition to your site’s tag (preferably with all your other JavaScript includes), one of a variety of flags can be added to your site. Visit www.flagtag.co.za now to show your true colours!

Right. Now that you’ve taken care of your online reputation, go out and buy some real stuff, take a deep breath and practice Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – we’ve got a lot of excitement to prepare for!

(And just because this is interesting, we made a point of checking the correct orientation for a vertical flag. Doing our best to be on the ball!)

GeekRetreat Stanford – My Personal Experience and Highlights

Peter Flynn — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:58:01 +0000

To summarize – GeekRetreat Stanford completely exceeded my expectations and the organizers ( Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve Dmochowska) deserve special recognition for their vision and approach which achieved such a superb result from such a motley crew of delegates. To expand, read the the rest of this post…So I left late on Friday and only managed to get to (the very awesome) Stanford Valley Lodge in time to make the end of the first session on Friday evening. I was immediately struck by the amount of stuff that had already been written down on the weekend planning wall and the quality of the discussion which was being being facilitated by Heather. The sessions were arranged into three kinds (I may not have the names exactly right): “Talking Heads” where we randomly where assigned to 3 of 10 possible groups facilitated by a volunteer to discuss a topic of their choosing; “Hot Spot” where 10 people each had 5 minutes to present (one way) an idea/topic/concept of their own choosing; and then finally longer slots (I think they were called “Skills Share”) where topical presentations were given in 1 hour slots. Apart from these more formal sessions, there were also plenty of informal times (including a fantastic visit to The Birkenhead Brewery) – and these are perhaps were the most valuable discussions took place – the discussions arising from the other more formal sessions. Highlights for me were:

Andy Volk‘s presentation about how his company, DownTempo use the margin generated from their consulting business to generate spin-off products and businesses. I was refreshed to learn about a company with so many similarities to ours, and learn about the ways that they have addressed many of the same challenges we face. I enjoyed his philosophy of preferring to “live in the land of “yes”" which means have a far more open relationship with other organizations with potential or real competitive overlap.
This in-turn inspired some great conversations between some of us who own and operate “overlapping” businesses – conversations we have all agreed to continue with – in this regard, I had excellent conversations with Jarred Cinman, Guy Taylor and Wesley Lynch;
Meeting and chatting to Sheraan Amod (Co-founder of Personera.com – check it out) about the “relentless focus” required to launch a web-based product and the journey he has been on;
Sitting in on a discussion with seasoned Tech journos like Samantha Perry and Ivo Vegter along with a bunch of other great minds while they discussed telecoms advocacy and what the most important issue(s) to address are in 2010;
Learning about the world of “Digital Agency” from Rob Stokes and Wesley Lynch and discovering how different that is to our world where we focus on heavy-lifting web app development consultancy – similar perhaps in terms of some of the “1′s and 0′s” churn out behind the scenes, but entirely different in terms of pre and post sales client engagements, the stakeholders we talk to and the types of conversations we have with customers and the industry at large;
Spontaneous, hilarious live entertainment from Willem van Straaten on Saturday night – and the general craziness of the community;
The international element and more tangible experience of “7 (or less)degrees of separation,” especially highlighted by Stefan Magdalinski, and also Stefan’s demonstration of how the internet can be used to liberate information (…and info wants to be free…)
The discussion about the role (and validity) of the various “ICT Entrepreneurship Initiatives” in South Africa at the moment – with special focus on The Silicon Cape Initiative, GeekRetreat itself and NetProphet;
A look into the excellent product Cognition and a conversation with Patrick Kayton about their journey so far;
A conversation with Andrea Broom and others about the uses of PersonL in the education field (something we had not seen before);
Seeing how many companies are running SCRUM in South Africa;
Steve Vosloo‘s “proof of concept” project called “Kontax” showing that kids will read books on a mobile web interface because “something is better than nothing”;
And finally, the general quality of conversation (ok – maybe not all of it – the Birkenhead Black Snake and Tequila supplied by Elan Lohman did its work:) on Saturday night);
And I’m pretty sure I have forgotten some things that I will only think of later…

A big up to all the sponsors as listed on the GeekRetreat site for funding the brilliant initiative.

Pic by Paul Furber, CC BY 3.0

Google Maps it’s Crowdsourcing Success

Noel — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:26:55 +0000

A week has passed since the South African Google Maps launch, time enough to settle the thoughts and put some fingers to keys. I’d have to admit that the launch was less than stellar, but perhaps I’m getting used to high-flying events like NetProphet, Silicon Cape and Internetix – and quite probably this wasn’t trying to be one of those. Maybe deliberately, the venue almost required one to have used mapping to find it, and many of those I spoke to had already sampled the new engine just to be told how to have used it. Finally, as a long-time user of GPS, and a veteran of Google’s mapping engine many years back in Europe, the directions being produced on this new co.za domain and displayed with fanfare, didn’t really rock my paradigm of what mapping should be. The Engineer-Heart in me finds this tragic given the amount of effort I know would have gone into bringing a new country online. Sign of the times…

That said, the underlying technology is doing an excellent job. Nay. A Very Excellent Job.

New (at least with this ease) was the ability to drag your navigation route to insert any number of waypoints – producing an instant recalculation of directions, turn-by-turn instructions and time/distance figures. Try it here. Oh. And perhaps alter the destination completely. No sweat. Processing. Done. Not only fantastic from a usability point-of-view, but demonstrating some pretty incredible behaviour ‘under-the-hood’.

A key-point during the presentation was the assertion that almost 70% of all searches return a geographical component – either an address or a proximity to an address – naturally prompting the thought that searches ought to natively focus on the location of results. To this end, Google’s Point-of-Interest (POI) search is clearly very powerful, and certainly one of the sharper arrows in their quiver: By locating businesses (via a layer) on their maps, they can aggregate everything known about these entities – their cloud-knowledge consisting of reviews, photos, recommendations etc – and present them all as a “more info” page. Not a big deal for Corporates perhaps, but a tremendous opportunity for vendors in hospitality, travel, activity and interest sectors, especially given the huge online research which now takes place before one travels. And not only will this cloud-knowledge grow with time, but this new potential for discovery provides a beautiful incentive for people to start adding their businesses to this layer, spending all their precious time making sure the salient information – operating hours, costs, services etc – is properly input to guarantee the correct display. Definitely in the businesses’ best interest. Yes. Indeed. If your business is not on the map, be sure to pop on over to the Local Business Center to increase your chance of winning. Presumably you’ve already registered to still be reading?

OK, so a few more comments. Considering the focus of the event was – as I understood – a more technical presentation, I felt that it could have capitalised far better on various methods of interacting/integrating with the mapping engine – via the API for example. Furthermore, very little spin was placed on the Android 2.0 incarnation which has caused more than a few GPS-vendors’ shares to “retreat” with its cloud-connected, turn-by-turn voice navigation. Click here for awkward-but-impressive video. Reading between the lines, it’s fairly apparent where Android is headed – premium access to the wealth of features Google sprouts from its Labs.

It’s also fairly obvious that layers are a big part of the Maps story. Already Transit layers exist, showing connections and promising timetables. Photo layers, Real-Estate layers, personalised “My Layers” and all manner of anecdotal mash-ups – all kindly supplied by you: The greater Google Employee.

So. My take-home at the end of the presentation was simply a “wow-gosh”. Not really about the barn-like venue, draped with sheets and lit with the 4 bright colours of world domination. Not really about the maps. Not even about their fancy javascript and mind-boggling aggregation algorithms. Simply a recognition that in this age of Crowdsourcing, Google are still miles ahead of anyone else in terms of incentivising people to share their time and effort. And I’m not just talking about registering businesses. I’m thinking about the effort we go through

making sure our blogs index correctly – Google has more access to information and opinion
doing the grunt work of facial classification in Picasa – how long until they’ve got a face/person search?
defining the conversion goals of all your sites – allowing further site-rankings on success?
populating their planet with 3D buildings – courtesy of SketchUp
fixing the cartography for fun – Map Maker to the rescue
providing a gazillion mails and documents a day to advertise against – all for the merry price of nil

The list is long. The incentives are spot-on. The enabling technology is spot-on. So just how many other industries will be beaten into submission because Google is spot-on?

Project failure rate still high. Agile is the answer.

Peter Flynn — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:53:15 +0000

A recent study shows how a disturbing number of development projects still fail due to poor upfront analysis.

I think that this oversimplifies – the devil is in the detail. From experience it is about far more than just “the wrong scope” (I’m referring to the project requirements as the “scope”) – it is also about “scope creep,” “scope change” and underlying business change which inevitably results in “scope change.”

If you want to scope a big development at the start of the development, you are going to have a tough choice when the inevitable scope change requests come. Either, enforce the “letter of the law” by referring to the brilliant/bullet-proof requirements documentation you created upfront OR allow the changes and “donate” the work required to the paying client.

Neither option is reasonable. Someone is going to lose out in either case.

There is an answer. It’s called Agile Development. At WWW, we use a particular methodology called “SCRUM.”

The Agile Manifesto puts the issues squarely on the table.

In simple terms: Work in smaller chunks. Deliver business value often. Collaborate with the software owner/sponsor very closely throughout the process. Accept that change is inevitable in software development – accommodate and encourage it. Ensure that everyone on the development team trained and mandated to maximize business value on behalf of the software sponsor/owner. Everyone on the team is both developer and analyst.

High Business Value, Low Complexity, Low Effort

Peter Flynn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:27:39 +0000

Fact: small technical implementations can sometimes have big perceived or real business benefits for clients…

White Wall Web recently worked with RE/MAX of Southern Africa to deliver a new digital initiative which “allows sales associates with profiles or accounts on major social networking sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) to add, manage and organise property listings through social bookmarking.” (Read more about this here)

This sounds exceptional from a business value perspective and has generated notable press coverage, but technically, this is one of the simplest implementations we have completed on behalf of RE/MAX of Southern Africa in the entire 5 years of working with them. This got me seriously thinking about maximizing business value when consulting…

Business Value, Complexity and Effort

When doing project work at WWW, we follow the SCRUM process. Three important metrics considered in the planning process are “business value,” “complexity” and “effort.”

Business Value is all about the value a piece of functionality will create in positioning a business to meet it’s organizational objectives.

Complexity is about how complex a piece of functionality is to produce.

Effort is about how long a piece of functionality will take to produce.

Complexity and Effort differ in that two tasks may take the same amount of time (effort) but require a far more skilled person to do the one than the other (complexity). Consider the difference between watching a 2 hour movie vs. conducting a 2 hour heart surgery.

Clients are happy when…

…they maximise business value while minimizing costs. Since both effort (time = money) and complexity (high skill = money) add cost.

Consultant’s Gold

As a consultant/solution provider you have struck gold when you find ways to maximize business value while keeping effort and complexity at a necessary low.

Fight the urge to use all your super powers all the time

As consultants/solutions providers (in any field) we have a great toolset of awesome super-powers. The urge is to use them all, all the time. We are conditioned to think “It’s not good enough to add some simple social-media-bookmarking-tool-bar to a website as a professional and respectable solution.” Surely that can’t be of great value? What will my peers say? How could I possibly do that and claim I have done something noteworthy/worthwhile?

It’s all about what you value

What we value most dictates what we will consider to be most commendable. For example, if you value a healthy family life, you will think that an 80 hour work week is excessive and stupid, but if you value hard work and maximum wealth creation, you will think that a 40 hour work week is lazy and stupid.

This issue is actually rooted in the same. As a consultant/solutions provider, if you value creating maximum business success for the clients you serve, your focus will be on business value creation at the lowest possible cost. If you value the technical implementation of a solution, that will be what you consider most commendable.

It’s also about professional maturity

A mature professional appreciates and celebrates the creation of business value.

It is immature to elevate technical implementation above business value creation because in reality, technical implementation is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself.

The Web Dev Community

As an international and local community, I think we are getting better at this, but we still have a way to go. What I mean is, I recall 3-4 years ago, techie forums (for example) being very heavy on the actual tech used in producing solutions. Some loud-mouths “out there” would lambaste others in the community for their technical implementations (even often when the resultant business value created was high, despite not-too-amazing tech)

As a community of practitioners, we need to continue create a new peer pressure: maximize business value, keep complexity and effort at a necessary minimum.

A developer/technician/consultant who gets this right is a true professional in my view.

Google’s Reflection in Chrome

Peter Flynn — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:11:12 +0000

This week saw the release of Google Chrome, Google’s new feature-rich browser based on WebKit and Firefox components. It has been met with a mixed response and has also raised some interesting thoughts/issues/discussions…

See for example the outcry about the extreme licensing “liberties” that Google is taking in their terms and conditions for Chrome (incidentally the same terms and conditions for Google Docs)

Basically, whatever content you put through the browser, they own it.

Also see the “abandon Firefox” article. The guys who are trying chrome will be predominantly Firefox users (IE users are slower to change/experiment). So the “we are taking on Microsoft” sentiment does not really roll in this case. Interesting to see how Firefox responds.

I am not that excited about it for web:

It uses the same WebKit based renderer as Safari (and an inferior version at that, read)
It doesn’t have some vital features that other browsers have (e.g. ad blockers) in order to serve Google’s other business objective (e.g. “making money through ads”)
It doesn’t (yet) work with a number of Google’s own products: techcrunch

- They do admit that they are “far from done”

Firefox has the head start on the web browser market when competing with Microsoft and Chrome will have to do much to beat them now.

An interesting aside, people are also raising concerns that these browsers with richer capabilities may cause a “split in internets”: information week

The most exciting prospect around Chrome seems to be the mobile version. Chrome is mostly likely to become the de facto standard on Android and thus mobile browser

Of course, it is a Google product and so I am sure it will ultimately be successful

Let’s see how it pans out…

4 Web Resolutions for 2008

Turbo — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:08:03 +0000

Off we go! Another year of discovery, excitement, change and quite possibly some daunting challenges awaits our brave developer hearts once more. As we walk bleary-eyed to our desks again, fresh smells of coffee filling the office, it’s an excellent time to refocus – amongst other things – on our technical goals; how we’d like technology to help us grow, but more importantly, what we can do to help technology grow.

I’ve decided to share some of my views on what I think are the pertinent issues this year, and the goals to achieve to that end. Thus, my top personal ‘Web Development Resolutions’ for this year are:

1. See the Year of the Web Standards?

With Microsoft finally being pressured into releasing a standards-compliant Internet Explorer, subsequently revealing that IE8 has passed the Acid2 test in an internal debug build, and hinting at a release sometime in mid-2008, we can finally glimpse the possibility of bringing web standards (at least in terms of CSS/XHTML) to the masses. Additionally, Firefox 3‘s ability to pass Acid2 natively (better late than never!) as well as Opera’s Kestrel builds with exhaustive CSS3 support (on desktop, the Wii and mobile phones), means we’ve never been able to reach as many platforms or people with the same features before. I believe this to be a ‘watershed’ year, where we’ll either see the myriad of Web Standards take off, or if they prove to be fundamentally flawed (they’re already proving difficult to implement), this may well be the beginning of complete dominance from other proprietrary solutions like Flash. There’s an emerging school of thought that standards are discouraging quick progression through lack of competition. I strongly disagree, as if one looks at the greatest problem plaguing the web, incompatibility, a look back into the past reveals that rampant browser competition in the late 90′s (IE Netscape days) resulted in far too many different proprietrary solutions for the same thing – something that still haunts us today.

2. Bridge the divide between the Client and Server Model

Although we’ve seen various frameworks like Ruby On Rails make our lives easier when dealing with user interfaces (especially AJAX), we’re still dealing with several different representations of the same data – on the page HTML, in the DOM, in the application code, in the database. Wouldn’t it be great if the client-side UI object was the same as the server-side one? Why do we need four or more languages and data models to work on the same platform? In my opinion, anyone who can conclusively create a single solution (which I believe is achievable), will elevate web development to the undisputed champion of cross-platform, accessible and efficient software design. I’ll race you there…

3. Go Mobile

Well, by now everyone is quite familiar with that prodigy of effective marketing, the iPhone. I’m sure most of you have considered the possiblity of making your applications work on it’s cut-down Webkit browser. However, consider the number of users you could reach if you could tap into the several hundred million cellphones worldwide with an internet connection. Recently I made the rather serendipitous discovery that Opera Mini 4 – which runs on any decent J2ME phone – was able to [mostly] run our AJAX-intensive WTimer application, which we hadn’t put a single second of mobile development time into. Surely, uncovering the workings of this browser will enable us to bring rich applications to not only the iPhone, but to the millions of normal mobile users out there.

4. Put old browsers to rest

Anyone else tired of dealing with IE6′s (or worse) compatiblity issues? As I aluded to briefly in our Heroes 2007 Conference, I’ve proposed a possible plan to tackle this knife in the side of web development:

Educate and Upgrade – Politely nag people using old browsers to upgrade to new ones. The trick is to work out a method that doesn’t detract from the value of the site itself. Perhaps via a notice, which links to a tailored, step-by-step guide on how and why to upgrade. If we can roll this out on a large scale, then hopefully we can knock down the figure of 40%+ IE6 users, and spend more time doing real coding.
Fix – There are a number of great scripts like Dean Edward’s IE7.js that can upgrade and fix a limited number of browser defects. Improving on these and chucking in some resetting CSS for example, could ease the pain of dealing with these browsers in the mean time.
Embed – With layout engines like WebKit introducing experimental features like offline databases, we may just be better off in some situations with tying applications into an embedded desktop application (eg. Fluid) and forcing clients to download and use them, virtually eliminating the problem altogether.

Perhaps with a plan like this, we can start developing websites and applications that break through the limitations of browsers that are nearly 10 years old. In conclusion, I’m very excited about the possibilities for the direction of web development technologies this year, but also feel that a lot of juggling of the elements and ideas will need to be done to master it. We must persue every avenue to come up with solutions that help us move forward…

“The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” — Unknown

How do you feel about these issues? Any comments you have will be appreciated. All the best to everyone for a fantastic 2008!

“[Google] can can extort, control, and dominate the world…”

Peter Flynn — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:49:46 +0000

Have a read: Google is massively invading Privacy - IOL (today)

Strong language, and we have heard it before, but we have seen that where there is smoke there is a fire… (yes that link is ironic). I think in years to come, Google’s (and Wikipedia’s) dominance will certainly become a major issue for various reasons.

Your thoughts? Conspiracy or looming reality… Do no evil? Absolute power corrupts absolutely? (it was difficult not to reference Wikipedia for these. I confess, I did use Google.)

PayPal: Good news for South African eCommerce

Peter Flynn — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:47:33 +0000

South African online buyers can now receive quotes in Rands and make credit card purchases through PayPal.

“Just the other day, I found out that South Africans can now get PayPal accounts and link them to a local credit card. When you buy something, the amount is deducted from your credit card and the system even tells you much it will be in rands.

The only major snag with PayPal, for us South Africans, is that you currently cannot withdraw the funds from your account into a local bank account.” Full article: http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?iArticleId=4128440

For receiving the funds into a business, you still can not deposit into a South African bank acount, but this can be solved through offshore options.

.Net ORM – object relational mapping tools

Andrew Keggie — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:26:08 +0000

In the last two weeks my development team has made a few new discoveries in the area .Net ORM tools. The new additions are Sub Sonic (free) and Entity Spaces (paid – $80).

We are in the process of evaluating and prototyping both of these tools for a enterprise sized web-application that we are about to start building. The team discovered these after struggling to implement the much talked about NHibernate ORM framework.

Both Sub Sonic and Entity Spaces are extremely easy to implement. You are not required to construct XML mapping files required to map classes to the database. These classes are auto generated by the tools themselves. Once this process has finished you are two lines of code away from populating data into your Views. Another great advantage of these tools is that they both support scaffolding.

We will keep you updated with developments of our hunt to find the ORM best suited to our upcoming development. We will also post some more technical articles with example code once we have further prototyped and researched the tools. What has been your experience with implementing .Net ORM’s?

Read more about some of the pro’s and con’s of Sub Sonic and Entity Spaces on Kevin Southworth’s blog.