Here’s a burndown chart for the ages: my January. The blue line is new issues created, the green line is issues completed.
During the slow early part I was actually going through the 218 page spec line-by-line, creating new issues for myself, which as you can see I entered all at once (the spike). Then over the next five days, that 48 number dropped to three.
Nothing like a good, old-fashioned, unmaintainable coding binge.
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When I said in the last post that I needed to pick up my worn out tools, I probably should have said rusted. All the important skills are still sharp: architecture, interface design, marketing sense. It’s the low level skills that need updating.
The last time I was cutting edge from a tools standpoint is 2006, which in my business is a dog’s age. Once was a time where I devoured a new technical book every other month. Now, for half a decade, I’ve been using Java EE 4 with EJB 2.1 and Struts 1.0.2. I’m even using CVS (not Subversion) and Ant (not Maven). For those who know, these are positively archaic technologies which have been replaced by better alternatives.
Many tools such as Spring and Hibernate were created to deal with the limitations of Java EE 4 (aka J2EE 1.4). After years of practical use, the Java community finally got around to improving Java EE itself, using many of the ideas of from Spring, Hibernate, and other tools. The result was Java EE 5 and later Java EE 6, which from what I can tell so far, are vast improvements, though incremental ones.
In the last two weeks, I’ve been reading Beginning Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3 by Antonio Goncalves. I’m working my way through JPA right now (Java Persistence API), which is Java EE’s answer to Hibernate. Having used Hibernate a bit, along with many other OODBs and ORMs, I’m enjoying the clarity of the spec. I’m looking forward to ripping up my EJB 2.1 code and replacing it with JPA code.
The other big, big change is the new JavaServer Faces, which is Java’s answer to Struts and friends. I did use Struts 2 a few years ago on another project, so am more current in the web page rendering world. I’ll let you know how JSF fares, whether it’s worth the effort to switch.
I’m hoping I can upgrade to a complete, compliant, Java EE stack, which gives me the benefit of swapping implementations relatively painlessly. I’ll try the new stuff on JBoss, GlassFish, and Resin, just to see how they compare, which is a wonderful benefit of open standards. You can wax poetically about open source all you like. I’ll take open standards over open source any day.
Anyway, time to rip up some floor boards and see what kind of mess I can make.
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I’m amazed now thinking I’ve been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life’s been lived, which couldn’t be truer for me these last weeks.
Someday I’ll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I’ll write when I’ve had more reflection and walkaway time. It’s an amazing story.
I’ll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula’s choir and watching handmade Christmas candles all aglow. The show will air on NBC next year, so stay tuned. Pennsylania viewers can watch PCN on Christmas Eve at 8pm and 10pm.
I’ll likely write about our new project crafting semantic web goodness for the medical field, enlisting the help of some very capable folk such as Dan Brickley and Danny Ayers among others. Details are deliberately sketchy as to who we’re working for and what we’re building, but it’s proving to be a *good thing*, both for the semweb and humanity at large.
I’ll no doubt write about “Web 2.0″ and Flock and a dozen other emerging efforts that have sprung up during the last nine months while I’ve been napping. I could write about our current plans for Tidepool and Storymill. Immuexa seem to have missed the wave we were waiting for, but from where I’m floating now, it’s not such a bad thing being off to the side. As I watch the world tumble competitvely forward, blathering endlessly in blogs about every incremental advance, I can’t help but think, “I’m glad I’m not on that ride.”
But most of all, I’ll write about being a new dad to little Isabel. For all I’ve been through and all I’ve thought and seen, there’s nothing that compares to simply sitting with her, working quietly on my laptop at 5am between feedings, gazing down at her peaceful beautiful face from time to time while I work. As John Gorka says, it’s an “ancient new direction”, and much more compelling to me these days than the latest “Web 2.0″ conjecture.
Tidepool and Storymill were always aimed at the celebration of real life. What can I say? I’m doing some research.
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*teefal wakes as from a long dream, picks up pen and paper, and begins again*
Four months ago, we finished the fruits of our work, Tidepool and Storymill, our self-named “Project Realize.” The plan after finishing was to engage the blogerati and publicize ourselves with links across the blogosphere. Instead, as such things in the web world usually do, someone stole our thunder: Flickr got bought by Yahoo a week after our launch. They soon snapped up the mindshare we were after; Flickr’s become quite the phenonemena, in an area we were aimed directly at.
For a while there, it made me sick to think of it. Seemed every day I’d type something into Google and see someone’s tagged Flickr photos pop on the page. Nevermind features, nevermind business models, nevermind niche markets … I felt personally defeated before I’d even caught my breath from the product launch. Truth is, the way I felt had more to do with other things, but whatever the cause, I didn’t have the strength to summon the publicist within me, and so Tidepool and Storymil sat mostly unnoticed.
Recently I remembered our initial vision, which had less to do with blogs and power laws, and more to do with real people and their memories:
Cherishing our shared heritage helps create and sustain real community, real meaningfulness, which many of us hunger for as an alternative to the soulless singularity of corporate branding and rubber stamp franchises that are slowly erasing the color and character of our towns and families.
Whereas Flickr proudly proclaims that they’re “Not your Grandfather’s Photo Sharing Site”, our aim has always been exactly the opposite. We’re about *realness*, not web views.
The ease with which they can explore and share this shared memory space will encourage them to further tell the stories of their lives and communities.
So today, with this post, I’ll start climbing that mountain once again.
No longer “realize”, today’s *realness* day, at least for me.
And being real, I’ll admit: I’m not sure I’m up to it.
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Today starts the task of revisiting products and websites in the same space as Tidepool and Storymill. We did some extensive competitive analysis a year ago during the initial design phase, but we’ve taken a blank page approach since then, not wanting to get into a feature war mindset as we finished things up.
Now it’s time to revisit iPhoto and Picasa and Flickr and Webshots and Photoshop Album and the rest, then boil it all down to a new website that compares everything with a feature grid, some reviews, and lots of discussion forums.
The trick is to do this all without any bias on our part. We’ve made the decision to praise similiar products where they deserve it, which on the surface is a risky thing for a business to do in public, as we can lose business because of it.
The deeper truth is that we’re trying to really learn what features people want most, so stimulating free discussion toward that end can only help us. This market is big enough, and we’re small enough, that we can afford to think out loud.
All we gotta do is get in the list.
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A personal request: please take a few minutes to read over Tidepool’s features. If you like where we’re headed, please help us spread the word by tellings friends or posting mentions of it publicly.
We’re a small company without much of a marketing budget that has just spent 15 months making two commercial Semantic Web apps. I believe that if we succeed even a little bit, the Semantic Web will be better for it.
Thanks,
Timothy
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We started integrating FOAF into Storymill and Tidepool more than a year ago. Like the RSS feeds that served up RDF and photos to PhotoBingo, we’ve hidden the FOAF fruits of our earlier efforts until we update things to be more compatible with our field-level permissions structure. You’d think with FOAF icons and the word “friend” everywhere on the site there’d be a least one FOAF file!
Don’t worry, they’re there. They’re just hidden. Every Storymill user will have an automatically generated FOAF file that gets dynamically created for each person that sees it (friends will see more info). The information shown will be adjusted according to configurable permission settings.
Other features that got covered up include: automatic PGP keys and signing (web of trust stuff), touch graph browsing, linking tags together, instant messaging interface, etc. These are largely done, and will surface in future releases.
If you want it sooner, encourage us. We’ve got a few other things to do too.
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Tonight we celebrated Immuexa’s seventh anniversary by publicly launching Tidepool and Storymill while having dinner at Bubba’s Pot Belly Stove in Quakertown PA. To check out our efforts, visit storymill.com. You can also read the announcement that got mailed out from Bubba’s.
Quite a trip it’s been from our first glimpse release a year ago and project start fifteen months ago. Many heartfelt thanks to Team Realize and the hundred helpful folk who made it all happen.
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After nine months of talk and fifteen months of solid work, we’re done.
Tonight we’ve released the first selling version of Tidepool and Storymill to a select group of friends. Since there’s currently no content on Storymill, we’re having a “mill-warming” first, wherein we dress up the place with our favorite photos and stories. After a few weeks of rummaging about the place ourselves, we’ll throw open our doors to the world.
We go public on March 21st.
If you’d like to participate in our “mill-warming”, send me an email.
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A year ago this morning, I watched my first Florida sunrise as I left behind Florida and (and ISWC) to start a new chapter in my life:
This morning, this sunrise, was a beginning not an ending. From here forward, I realize the dream.
On the plane home, I worked out the details of my decision. Immuexa, our six year old software & website service business would need to close to new clients to focus on internal product development (which we did). I’d have to learn more about the semantic web, writing down what I found in a blog (which I started a month later). I’d have to take on a new business partner (which I did). We’d have to find a way to fund at least a year of development (which we did). But most of all, we’d have to brace ourselves for an arduous journey: big goals on a small budget.
We started “Project Realize” two months later, and since then, our all-out effort to build Tidepool & Storymill has been quite a toboggan run. Today I’m writing our “Endgame Roadmap” for the team. Here’s a peek:
In a track race, the start is tense, the laps are grueling, but it’s that last push … the home stretch … that defines the outcome. We’ve passed the last corner and can see the finish line. All that stands in our way is our own exhaustion.
It’s been a rough ten months. We’ve accomplished an amazing amount in a short time, with a small staff and a meager budget. Everyone has clearly given their all up till now, but the hardest work is still in front of us. Somehow, in the next two months, we need to summon up the stamina to push through two final releases.
Now’s the time to bring it all together, surfacing code that’s been hidden, making things more solid, polishing the edges, presenting our case on the website, so we can then properly unleash our efforts on the world.
In other news, the 1st FOAF Bingo game concluded a few hours ago. Congrats and thanks to all who played. The end was a real slugfest for third place. Top honors go to “benja”, “crschmidt”, and “pzerkle”, who eeked past “mortenf” at the last minute. See the website for standings.
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to describe his vision of the Semantic Web (used with permission)
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