Tonight FlyingKiteMedia is celebrating it's one year anniversary. I'm proud of her accomplishments in her first year.  It's not easy creating content and making a business all at once. But as i thought about what FK covered this year I became more present to all the amazing things that are happening in Philadelphia. 

This same week the Mayor showed up to Seger Playground where my wife is co-president of the friends playground group. Seger is the block sized park at 11th and Lombard. The community got organized and is planning an incredible renovation, 

People used to ask me how i ended up in Philly. I had never planned on staying. But Philadelphia has become a more awesome city every year I've been here. I have no doubt that if it was the same city I arrived to in 1994. I'd be long gone. But slowly, consistently. It's improved. The arts have been strong in Philadelphia for a long time. But while I've been here the tech scene outside of biotech has flourished, the food scene is pretty spectacular. The parks have improved. Neighborhoods are being revitalized. This year for the first time in 50 years the city grew!

It's all just getting started. 

I <3 Philly

This article on Techcrunch sure ruffled  some feathers.  Quite frankly, it's conclusion was mediocre at best, but we're already talking about Techcrunch. Developers and the press and software makers love to run to new tools. I have of course been guilty of it myself on occasion. I used to think hibernate was the Holy grail back in 2003. The flocking is due to what the article mentions. Software development feels broken. 

I don't think so. 

I work with startups. Either as a consultant, or I've been inside them working as and with founders that weren't technical. My favorite metaphor across an organization is building a house. There are a lot of ways to do it! We've been building houses for 4000 years if not longer. Yet talk to someone who just had a house built or is renovating one. It can be a nightmare.

 But it's not always a nightmare – It is just complex.

I tweeted about the article and then discussed it with one of the developers that works for portfolio company 123Linkit. Daniel is one of the best Ruby developers I've seen work for me or my portfolio companies. He fully explains what he's going to do and he's cautious about his estimates. He gets things done. He is a huge advocate of Test Driven Design and Unit Testing. There are many at Indy Hall that fall in this camp. I on the other hand have never been in a TDD shop nor have i run any of my own shops that way. I just never could see the value in it. 

The article mentions the hate of TDD, it doesn't really go into why. I never had a why either. It just felt inefficient. I've tried it. I've gotten committed and put the work in for a couple months. But then I always prefer features. I never felt the tests were "catching anything."  So I stopped. 

I've never looked back. My latest software project was 9 months of development and has been running in a real-time environment for 18 months without a single outage. There are constant enhancements that are deployed by the dev team without a test. 

How?

1) Code Review. Code Review takes less time than TDD. People hate it more that testing but can get with it.

2) Communication - features are documented simply. In email with excel or google doc explaining what it will do.

3) Typed langauges. On this project we used Java and Google Web Toolkit. Half the things Unit tests would find are found at complie time (really coding time, because the IDE flags it immediately) 

But really it's number 1. Tests won't find flawed architecture. Tests won't find bad algorithms. Tests won't even find bad code. Just wrong code. Code Review gets everyone talking about the problem AND the solution.  The team gets on the same page. And that is what is most important.

Unfortunately, a miss-communication with my babysitter had me go home instead of attend the fishbowl last night. I ditchd Brian Glick and my partner, Chris Myers and had to go on home. 

I read the feed last night and the posts this morning. I just got done reading Alex Hillman's post about it.

Here are my comments:

Fragmentation of the community

PSL originally started for the non-founders and myself as the Happy Hours.  They were a way for everyone to see who was there and what people were up to. But 3 years on the happy hours have become inconsistent, moved around and generally not promoted. PSL was largely formed by the people meeting at the Happy Hours and then they were suddenly untended as the big 1 time events like FounderFactory became the focus of the leadership and the things to 'Market.' This was a huge mistake. The community was lost and PSL became a listserve + 2 events per year.

As for the fragmentation, that's a good thing. The Philly Tech meetup is an example of the need being addressed. It's hilarious at one level because I've attended so many PSL events and read so many listserve emails about not enough tech-entrepreneurs in Philadelphia.  It turns out there's a bunch, they just didn't want to work for free at someone ELSE's startup. 

PSL has to focus on fostering the larger community it's part of. It should be reaching out to the GameLab and Tech meetups and helping them and being a larger umbrella for what's going on here. It needs to keep up its maintenance events as well.

I have recently been working with a new client that needs to manage its worldwide Rich Media Assets. It's taken me back from my hiatus from all things internet video. I haven't really been in that space since we changed Sivoo from a direct to consumer content channel to a B2B asset publishing platform.  I'm shocked at how little the space has evolved since I left it in 2008.

There are great solutions for the enterprise. Great, expensive solutions. There are great solutions for the video production workflow. But there are no great solutions for medium size organizations to manage simple workflows and manage simple asset transcoding and manipulation. 

I have found a couple small companies that I am impressed with. Xinet being one of them. The need to work on their marketing because they could have easily been missed http://www.xinet.com/index.php

Still, they seem to need a techie to be involved to make the solution work. I'm really curious about the deman for these products. Perhaps this isn't really an itch that needs to be scratched for most small organizations. 

I've had a change of heart today. I've decided they should keep Guantanamo Prison open. They need to put  this guy there. No other punishment would be as just.

There is an incredible story on NPR this morning about how the largest Prison companies influenced and drafted the legislation for Arizona to imprison persons who cannot prove they are in the U.S. legally. 

The harshness of the legislation has been criticized since it's inception. However, even if you agree with the principles of the legislation. You have to wonder who's pockets are getting lined at this point.

The problem with the private sector being in such close partnership with Legislators is that the people's interests have not been represented throughout the process. And, the corporations are holding the spirit and implementation of the law secondary to profits.

Just last year in Scranton, PA we had the Cash for Kids Scandal  where a judge and company where in cahoots to fill a juvenile detention center with children so the prison run by the private corporation could bill the City and state.

We now have a situation where  corporations with little accountability and growing power are running some of our most important institutions. Our prison systems, our school systems and increasingly our military and intelligence operations. The problem is that the profit motive is not the enough to keep these instutions and their benefactors honest! Especially since their profits are almost always tied the opposite of the desired result. The prison companies have no desire to empty the prisons, BlackWater has no desire to end security operations, etc.

Bad schools are one thing, but the increasing prison populations and profiteering off of them are a disgrace to our nation.  

I just thought of a great metaphor to unabashed /unregulated free markets. When I was in India this thing would happen that was absolutely amazing. The roads had very little, if any, regulation and enforcement. Besides the people operating cars, motorcycles and buses that were probably not qualified the more interesting phenomenon was at RailRoad Crossings.

Whenever a train would stop traffic. Cars and motorcycles would line up just like here in the US. But once the line got to about 5 cars deep. Cars would start queuing  up in the other lane. Soon on the shoulder and even the grass. 

Now, of course, this exact thing was happening on the other sideof the train. So when the train would finish crossing traffic had to remerge and decongest. As americans it actually annoyed most of us. 

This is what happens when everyone acts in their own "self interest", uninformed of the full breadth of the consequences and without any centralized information or enforcement.