I recently reviewed Neal Ford on Agile Engineering Practices by O’Reilly Media this title is available both as part Safari Books Online, here or as stand alone.

“Agile Engineering Practices” runs as a workshop, 7 hours long, and goes over all aspects of engineering practices. The list of topics goes as follows:

• Key Principles
• Estimation
• Test-driven Design Part 1
• Test-driven Design Part 2
• Pair Programming
• Automation
• Version Control Strategies
• Testing the Entire Stack
• Functional Tests
• Agile Design
• Emergent Design Enablers

Key Principles: provides a bit of history on software engineering & some great food for thought. It reminded me of Glenn Vanderburg’s talks on engineering given at railsconf 2011 & 2010.

TDD part1 & 2: If you’re do TDD normally, please do skip the TDD portion. I can reassume it with use a more flexible/powerful language to test a less flexible one. (use groovy to test java, etc).

If you work at a shop that doesn’t do TDD please do watch it, and use the data & statistics that it gives you as ammo to convince your boss or coworkers. It’s also interesting to see how he approaches TDD, which is more bottom up than what I am used to do.

Pair Programming: Same goes for Pair Programming. Although I have paired in the past, I have never done it exclusively. Neal provided some info on why certain times it worked while other times it failed miserably. I found a lot of actionable ideas during this section.

Automation: Great segment, gave me good ideas on how I could integrate effective information radiators. Also I had similar experience with failed efforts which provided me with some comfort that I am not (with my team) struggling alone.

Testing the entire stack: goes over strategies to test the entire stack. The different level of testing: unit, functional, integration, user acceptance. Mocking & stubbing strategies.

Functional Tests: is continuing the overview from the previous segment. While watching these 2 segments get ready to write down names of really cool tools that you can use especially if you’re in java world. Some type of testing that you normally don’t thing about like system testing, quality of service testing, non functional testing.

Agile design: This was one of my favorite segments. I liked the distinction between accidental complexity & essential complexity. Check out sonar, a technical debt calculator.

Emergent Design Enablers: Neal demonstrates how refactoring, not just by tools, can simplify & show off the emergent design of the software. He talks about how certain metrics will show idiomatic patterns, he uses as an example how looking at cyclomatic complexity & afferent coupling uncovered a pretty bad idiomatic pattern within struts 2. He then goes over how capturing such idiomatic patterns in both java & ruby. (He shows a pretty neat technique in ruby that I hadn’t thought about through method added hook)

Conclusion: I highly recommend this title. Find the time to dedicate to it and watch it, take notes & stop whenever you get struck with an idea. It’ll be too hard later to remember what the idea was. It’s 7 hours after all.

This summer I had the pleasure to review Luke Wroblewski’s O’Reilly master class on Designing for mobile first This title is also available on safari books online (best deal ever, get on safari). For those who follow Luke Wroblewski’s writing at http://lukew.com/ regularly & have read Tapworthy this might be a bit of redundant data. Even so, it’s nice to have it all nicely compiled in a 3 hours workshop.

If you haven’t started looking at designing for mobile device or even if you have this is the workshop you need to watch. It’ll definitely jump start you in the first case & round you on the second. In case you haven’t figured it out, mobile is not the next big thing, it’s the current big thing.

Aside from all the statistics & reasons on why you should care about mobile, what I liked about the workshop were certain design considerations. But that’s not all, Luke goes into the heart of how you need to think in terms of mobile design. To properly understand how to design for your user you need to envision him/her not at their desk but on the run, with a coffee on one hand and the mobile on the other. What are they trying to do? What is their goal? Because designing for mobile means being much more goal oriented. I love how he propose it: think about your user as 1 eye, 1 thumb. Partial attention = Focused design. (priceless advise)

Luke give a thorough overview of both mobile capabilities & mobile constraints.  Some of the mobile constraints also are some of its strengths as well. He talks about how to align the design with the mobile behavior. He shows some very interesting approaches to the navigation (learned quite a bit). From high level stuff, user motivation/activities to the nitty gritty implementation details, touch target size, mobile form structure, css sprites etc. Luke covered it all. Added bonus, Luke shares his knowledge of how to structure forms (sequential, non-linear, contextual), mobile or not, for more on that read his book.

If you’re involved in designing a mobile experience you owe it to your customers & your company to watch this workshop. If you have a subscription to safari books online, search for this title as it is available there.

I cannot recommend this workshop high enough.

Update: Luke has come out with a book properly titled Mobile First published by a book apart. Also some free videos are available as well as many articles.

Here are some links about the lean startup event @ sxsw with a great agenda

• SXSW 2011 day 2. The Lean Startup Phenomenon
• running lean hq (founded by Ash Maurya & Ed Roman, so to add it to your rss reader) has a bunch of great posts with slides, David Binetti Presentation from Lean Startup Day at SXSW, Lean Startup SXSWi Slides – Ash Maurya and more.
• Appsumo has a great $50 deal that’ll get you signed up for a leanstartup challenge with a chance to win $100,000+ (the bundle includes “the lean startup” book among many other things)
• mapOmatic comments here

From the comments on twitter I am surprised by how many people have not read yet the “business model generator” or have not heard about the business model canvas.

If you care only about the slides here they are:

[slideshare id=7243724&doc=ash-sxsw-110312113219-phpapp01]

[slideshare id=7252469&doc=dbinetti-110313162535-phpapp02]

[slideshare id=7244367&doc=sxswnewrulesforthenewbubble031211-110312131724-phpapp01]

To recap, recently I criticized a couple of slides from Mary Meeker’s presentation.
In short: I don’t think the $50 billion dollar ad spending opportunity exists as stated in her presentation.

Different rules apply for different media.
In a recent article Joel Comm the author of KaChing talks about how he ran the same ad on TV & on youtube.

The 2 takeaway points from the articles:

1. tv ads don’t convert not even close as online ads. (it’s also very hard to cross media)
2. The ad ran on youtube for free and generated 753 conversions, almost 7x as much as the $10,000 tv ad.

From the article:
The tv ad appeared 230 times on such top-rated shows as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Fast Money, Man vs. Food, Mad Men, and Wall Street Journal Report. The commercials created a total of 8.3 million impressions but led to only 112 website visits, a conversion rate of less than 0.001 , and 40 form filled.
Cost $10,000

The YouTube video received 5,000 views. That led to 1,375 visits to KaChing’s website. That’s a conversion rate of nearly 33 percent. Of those visitors, more than half — 753 people
Cost $0 (beside ad production)

My take away is this: 753 signups/$0 cost.

So can you spend $50 Billion in advertising? Sure, if you do I have a bridge you might be interested into buying.
Do you need to? Nope (Unless you don’t know what you’re doing), and people are figuring it out.

So do I think the $50 billion opportunity in ad spending will happen? It depends on how fast people catch on.

Last monday I got up bright and early and I told to myself: “Tomorrow I’ll start writing a column on procrastination”. Then I realized that I wasn’t thinking big enough and fully considered the importance of this body of work.  So I  rescheduled it for next monday, first thing in the morning.

What you call procrastination I call careful & meticulous pre-planning … of the planning … of the thing

What you call procrastination I call prudence. You just don’t want to jump in haphazardly and just do it, without first almost think about the consequences.

Comparing procrastination to unfinished thoughts it’s completely bogus. Saying that it brings you to never finish what you started is like saying

I recently looked at the slides from Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Presentation About The State Of The Web, which can be found @ http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meekers-web-2010-11#-1 Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Presentation About The State Of The Web.

While I find this analysis really interesting, tons of good data to digest here, I disagree on a couple of points.

Here are my 2 main objections/comments:

Slide #15

Completely disagree with the $50B global opportunity, it is in my opinion a pipe dream because the reasoning is flawed.

All the slides are telling you that this is an ever changing market that is already shifting to mobile faster than most can adjust. It’s revolutionizing everything that we know and creating products & markets that we could have never imagined. It’s behaving in way completely unexpected, but forget all that. The same rules of ad spending from the old media will apply!

What kind of bullshit is that. That’s literally hiding your head in the sand.

Yes, you could convince companies to make that spend but it’d be mostly wasted. Lots of people are using mobile version of websites, from their desktop mind you, because they have no ads and the sites are simpler and cleaner. If you put funny/engaging/awesome content people will do the marketing for you. Don’t think they get it. (“it” being the internet, a new medium out of anybody’s control*)

The main difference is that the publishers know that they can’t put lots of advertising without alienating the users. Furthermore content production on the internet is cheap and getting cheaper by the minute. The same is not true for old media. The market of scale doesn’t apply as much to old media. That’s just one of the many reason why we won’t see that much spending online.

It doesn’t work and It’s not needed:

1. By the product makers: Word of mouth on the internet has much greater repercussion than on the streets. Viral marketing is much more efficient & the bang has no relation to the buck.
2. By the consumer: If you have a great product, I will found you. If your product sucks, I’ll find out.
3. By the publisher: Compare the cost of putting a 30 minute show on tv $100k+/episode vs online $10/mo or free.

There are much better way to do “ad” spending. As well as there are new ways of ad spending, think groupon.

Slide #20 - Where are the great online ads?

As above it’s a different medium. Think viral campaigns, viral videos & games, viral marketing. Don’t look at ads, banner and the likes.

Campaigns:

1. Have we forgotten Obama’s “yes, we can”, then the remix by Will.I.Am? Wasn’t that the big online ad for 2008.
2. I’d say undoubtly this year old-spice campaign was the great online viral campaign of the year.
3. http://www.elfyourself.com/ was a great viral campaign a 3-4 years ago.
4. Will it blend? Blender Company made a whole series of youtube videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI&feature=player_embedded most episodes have 5+ million views (iphone & ipad 9M+)

Videos:

1. The band Ok Go marketed themselves by creating very creative videos.
2. Lazy sunday  http://www.hulu.com/watch/1397/saturday-night-live-snl-digital-short-lazy-sunday probably caused a myriad of new  viewer for SNL. Hundreds of responses from youtube users. The SNL shorts are among the most seek out videos on hulu/youtube.
3. Family guy’s clips were available online when it was cancelled. They were incredibly viral, I used to get links to them all the time. I personally think that’s what caused the show to be put back on prime time.

Again the author tries to apply old rules to new media. Different rules apply.

Conclusion:

Go look at the slides, they are very informative and give good food for your thoughts

*why out of control?

Aside from paying some $ for access. The internet is very much unlike tv/cable/radio, where you can’t do much to change the rules and change the offering. Can anybody contribute new channels at will to every cable subscriber on earth? You can live an ad-free life if you want on the internet. Everything now has feeds, you can get the feeds and parse out the ads. RSS feeds have revolutionized how content syndication happens.

Couple of weeks ago I finished reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. I greatly recommend this book, in fact I am now reading Nassim’s previous book.

What is a black swan? Briefly an unknown unknown. Something that is completely out of the blue that it’s practically impossible to plan for. If you planned for it, the black swan would be something else. Not to say that you can’t protect yourself from it.

The book shows a couple of great way to think about your data and how to prove, or better to disprove, your theories. I have found that negative empiricism has served me well in the past few weeks. Negative empiricism is pretty much trying to find data points that disprove your theory. It’s way to easy to find data points that prove your theory, for as long as you create some reasoning around them, some ‘narrative’, you can make sense out of all kind of random events. We humans are quite adept at doing so too. For as many data points as you can find you’ll never be truly 100% sure that your theory is correct.

On the other hand once you have a theory, 1 single data point is all that is need to debunk it. It’s much faster that way to come to a good theory.

I have found myself many times a victim of the narrative fallacy, brought to my attention this writer as well as from Dan Ariely.

Overall lots of great new concepts, ludic fallacy being one of them, highly recommend it.

Zach Galifianakis

Sam Beam – Iron & Wine

Guess Who?

It’s Zach Galifianakis

These are my slides for September’s Boca Raton’s ruby meetup. I’ll be giving an introduction to HTML 5. Just the markup. I cover semantic changes, deprecation and the new tags. Including gotchas.

Unfortunately there is just too much in HTML 5 for a single sitting.

Objectified is a great documentary on design, with lot’s of interviews and great design examples available on netflix http://bit.ly/admKLQ. I highly recommend it for any designer or aspiring ones. I particularly love the participation of one of my favorite designers Dieter Rams, from Braun fame. Here he kinda introduces Jonathan Ive.

Many clips are available on youtube so you can make up your mind if you want to watch it.

It’s the same director as “Helvetica” probably a cooler documentary because it’s so specific.

I guess now I have to go back and finally finish reading The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve had this book for a very long time but I can’t never see myself to read it. I really don’t like the typesetting on it. I guess I’ll force myself.