{ Monthly Archives }
May 2010
When Developers Click
Recently I’ve been working on a big project with a superstar named Paul. He’s in Banglore, I’m in Toronto, and most of the rest of the people we work with are in New York.
We really clicked on the project and were able to do some cool agile development. Together we finished up a project at an insane pace. Throwing out builds, iterating fixes quickly, re-factoring daily or more, it just came together well.
Its made me realize that geographic co-location is really not required for development/engineering work. I think the co-location habit is needed for the chatty folks who want to have long meetings and whiteboard things up and talk about them a lot. If you are just trying to get work done, Skype + a good fast dev->build->test system work even better than chattiness and whiteboards. Nothing is easier than “run this test and read the logs and you’ll see some null pointer exception” – no whiteboards necessary.
And that’s what we did, we just opened up code and dove into it, every once in a while resurfacing for both sleep and re-factoring goodness. It is amazing what a small pair of developers can do when they are clicking and being super productive.
PeekSocial is Alive
We enabled registrations again for PeekSocial again. Sorry for the inconvenience to anybody who wanted to register the past week and a bit. www.peeksocial.com
Android Tablets Look Yummy
So Mother’s Day came along. As some of you know my wife is a new mother. She of course has a Peek, and while nursing and doing other mommy things, she lives on it in order to keep up to date with friends and life.
Sometimes though, she is up to date on email, and wants to watch a tv show, or read the news, etc, etc. So she’ll lug out her laptop and put it beside her nursing chair and crane her neck in a godawful way to do stuff while nursing.
Watching all this I thought “man she needs a tablet”. The iPad is clearly too expensive for anybody with an ounce of sanity to buy, and of course I have been following the news on Android tablets.
So with great timing Archos launched their Archos 7 Android Home Tablet. I’m excited for a few reason:
1. Its $199!!!
2. Its Android so you get tons of apps on it
To folks outside of the embedded world, I often don’t think they realize how earth-shattering Android has been. In the world of embedded open-source was a non-existent idea. Everything was closed off and proprietary, or failed miserably because it was masked open-sourced (*cough, cough Symbian*).
Android has really changed the game. If you are a device maker now a days, you don’t have to worry about tossing down $1M for a good OS/SDK with tons of apps. You can just use Android. Unless you use a low-cost, smaller CPU… like say Peek or one of the 3 billion phones on the market.
And the Archos7 is one of those devices, that probably saved a ton of money porting Android to their device, and ultimately were able to provide an earth shatteringly low price tablet – $199! Anybody else interested in pre-ordering, you can buy it here.
