A common dilemma of many tech managers and businesses in general is when presented with a business problem, do you build your own software or do you buy? For some companies, this is an easy answer. Some development teams are not equipped with the skills to build a particular tool or product. Other companies just do not have any budget available for the product needed, but do have ample resources to work on development. But for the teams and situations that fall in that middle or gray area, what do you do?

So, how do you decide to build or buy? Through my experiences I have compiled a short list of questions you need to ask yourself as a technology manager.

1. Do I have a budget to buy this product? – If not, the answer has been made for you. You will need to build a product that does the task, or at least can hold you off until there are available funds for purchase. Beware of the trap of building a ‘good enough’ product that then stays long past its shelf life.
2. Can my team build this? – This question has a couple of things to consider. Does your team have the skillets to build the product. Development teams have roles, and sometimes its obvious. For example a web team that builds games is just not going to build a billing system for you. Second, do you have the available resources and time? You may have the talent, but will you be able to set aside the right talent for the time required? They may be needed elsewhere.
3. Does developing in house cost me in other ways? – Once again this speaks to your talent base. Maybe you can put a developer on this application for the time required, but are you missing out on future development opportunities? Is this project so far from their original skills and desires that you will diminish team morale? Less tangible than cost, these are still important to consider.
4. Will the commercial software suit my needs? – My experience has been that many products have a set fee, but then you need to factor in the additional cost of customizations or additions that will suit your business needs. Or you think you can get away with a basic implementation, but soon need to upgrade, incurring additional costs. Or if you are paying for a subscription model, there may come a time when this may not be cost effective anymore.
5. What will the cost be to build? – Again there are a couple of things to look at here. First, how many development hours will a project take? To get a good assessment, you need to be skilled at creating project estimates. If done incorrectly you can end up in a losing proposition. Ask yourself, does your company have a history of feature creep? If so, this project will inevitably take much longer than originally thought. Finally, what is your possible productivity loss? Does putting 2 developers on a six month project keep you from developing a new tool that can be monetized? As Opportunity costs are just as important as accounting cost.
6. Could this be outsourced? – Sometimes the solution is not to build in house, or buy, but rather to have a custom application developed for you. It has been my direct experience that a lot of outsourced code, while possibly cheaper initially has cost more to grow over time. Digging through lines of code to fix bugs or to add a feature ends up wasting a lot of time. If you expect the contracting company to support the product, make sure they have been around awhile, and that you feel confident they will be there in the future. Also make sure their business model allows for incremental updates and support. Many consulting teams work on building and deploying full tools, and are not interested incremental additions.

I have to admit with the increased amount of opensource code in the community and advanced APIs to work with, I tend to build. We can usually find a good opensource product, edit and grow it for our needs, and save a lot of time and headaches. Or we buy a small commercial component that takes care of some aspect of the tool that we could/should not build, then build around that component.

Do you have similar issues? How do you decide whether to build or buy? Maybe you made a decision and wish you had chosen the other? Did I miss a major point in my decision process? I’d love to hear from you. Join the discussion in the comments. We should all learn from each others experiences.

image by msmail

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A few months ago I wrote a post describing the benefits of using project collaboration software. It helps team members communicate, it avoids information hording, and at any time management can check in and see a project’s progress.

At my job we use BaseCamp. It is a paid product that is extremely powerful and truly helpful. BaseCamp allows you to get projects done, and in my experience does not seem to add a layer of distracting work or complexity. Its features include a wiki, messaging system, a place to store files, and even chat. There is a tool for almost every group’s style. But for my purposes it was lacking some much needed reporting features. This is by design. The creators of BaseCamp felt that instead of developing tons of reports that never to EXACTLY what everyone needs, they would build an API. With the API, you could then in theory build reports that suit your specific needs.

We have a weekly managers meeting where we briefly run down all our open projects and their status. The responsible party can then update and if necessary elaborate briefly on specific items within their project. It is a great meeting to have because it gets all parties from various groups in one room where we quickly keep everyone abreast of the projects being worked on. People in theory can get all the same information from BaseCamp themselves, but reality is this is not always the case. Having the meeting lets us discuss small items with other groups and departments without having to have a longer time consuming meeting.

To create a report for this meeting, I decided to try the BaseCamp API. I figured a quick report that can generate a concise PDF to print out and bring to the meeting will work best. I sat down and used my regular tech community channels to see if anyone has created a BaseCamp API module for ColdFusion. Sure enough, I found baseCamp.cfc from Terrence Ryan. It was exactly what I was looking for. It was written for the older BaseCamp API, so I had to plug in some new methods, but it was a real time saver because it handled all the requests, and parsing of the responses.

I created a report that gathers the list of open projects and their details. First you login with your BaseCamp credentials. Hers is something to take note of. The API code is now logged in as you. If you are creating a report of all the projects to share, then you MUST login as a user who has access to all the projects. It needs to be your account creator, or very high level user. Alternatively, you can simply create a user called reports, and have them automatically added to ALL projects. Then hardcode your API tool to login as this user, and you will have the highest level access to print accurate reports.

Once logged in I grab all the active projects. Then I loop through the project list and make additional API calls to collect the open to-dos and incomplete milestones for each project. Then when I have all my data, I loop through all this information, and format the projects with all their remaining work and due dates.
I also created a longer report that retrieves closed items as well, and adds some more verbose details.

I also had a second need for a report. I have a group of developers that report to me. Each week we go over their assigned tasks and discuss progress. It also gives us a good chance to discuss common problems others may have come across, and share information. The first few weeks after implementing BaseCamp, I was forced to click on every project and then see what was assigned to who, or click on every person and grab their assigned to-do list. The second option was better than the first, but both were little wasteful and time consuming.

Instead, I created a report. First I retrieve all active users from BaseCamp. I display those names as a series of checkboxes. Now any user I csn scroll through the list, and grab the assignments for all the users they checked off at one time. When I loop through the user list, I grab each to-do assigned to them. I can also collect the project information and group the report together by project. So now we can simply review the list of projects and the assignments as a team. It helped keep my meeting organized and productive.

Once I retrieve all the BaseCamp info, parse it, and output it, I have an HTML and PDF view of the reports. Converting output to PDF is extremely simple in ColdFusion, and this gives me great flexibility. Now we can print out a stack of reports when needed, or in the case of my personal group’s meeting, I can simply view it on the computer.

BaseCamp and ColdFusion really paired nicely using the API. I have another report I plan to code soon, involving timesheets. I plan to be able to create timesheets based on project, person, and for various timeframes. I will keep you updated on how it goes.

Does anyone else use the BaseCamp API for their needs? Please share your ideas and experiences in the comments section. I’d love to get new ideas to make BaseCamp even more useful.

image by nataliej

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As usual, a semi-weekly wrap up of links, tidbits, and other sites that came across my plate. Code, development, management, anything I found interesting since the last post. Feel free to suggest other links in the comments.

Web Tools

• hidetext – I plan to use this one on my blog and see if it works. You type text and it translates it to a graphic that is human readable but hidden to spammer bots. Its creative too. If you type in a google email address, the graphic it creates can be drawn in the google rainbow of colors.
• ADrive – File storage and sharing site. 50Gb free. I first saw this one on The 2.0 Life. I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since xDrive shit down. Why not start back at the top of the alphabet?
• Windows 7 Release Candidate – Windows 7 RC1 was released this week and the reviews are positive. Is it actually good or did Vista set the bar so low, we would welcome windows 3.11 at this point? Time will tell.
• PDF To Excel Online – Upload a PDF file and you are returned an excel (CSV) table of data. I havent used it, but reviews I read say its fairly accurate, and if you need this type conversion, I haven’t seen many choices before.

Web Talk/Blogs

• Cool changes coming to Twitter Search | Webware – CNET – Discusses the major improvements that are coming to Twitter search. Important for developers and Twitter users alike.
• Find free alternatives to commercial apps with osalt – Blog Post from Hack Your Day about another product that helps you find free alternatives to commercial software.
• 6 Tools To Be An Effective Web Developer – Good post, the title says it all.
• Why You Want To Be A Craftsman Instead Of
  A Cowboy -Another good post from Geek Daily. I’ve said this one many times before, only I use the terms practical Vs ideal. Not to ruin the read, but I agree with the author, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
• What is creativity? – Short musing about creativity and whether developers can be creative or is that reserved for designer.

Web Tips/Resources

• Google Similar Images – Search product from Google Labs, where you can find an image and search for similar images based on look. not perfect but usually more reliable than keyword searching for images.
• A Snippet on JQuery -Very brief (but good) intro to jQuery.

Misc. ‘Fun’ Stuff

• Game to let you run your own Ponzi scheme | Webware – CNET – Fun game where you run your own ponzi scheme or simply invest fake money in one. You make as much as you can taking money form investors or investing before the ‘feds’ shut down your ponzi scheme. the feds are the company employees.

Enjoy, and have a good weekend.
Post any good resources or links you use in the comments.

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Solid Architecture is a Dying Art

When I was in my CS program from 1992-97, we coded in ANSI C and COBOL. As a web developer, a lot of the specific code we wrote is no longer applicable today.  One major concept that was vital to writing code during my college years that I feel is useful and probably not a focus these days is writing tight, effective code.

When I graduated college, my first job was pretty groundbreaking. We were writing full featured mobile apps for field use. We had to work with heavy handheld devices that communicated with CDPD or dial-up to transfer their data. They had 256k RAM, 4Mb harddrives, and 9,600 baud modems. We had to focus on writing tight code, and conserving space on locally and for data transfer.

Today harddrive space, RAM, and processing power is cheap. Very cheap, and you don’t even have to have your own. You can rent power and spawn processes and database space as needed on Amazon ec2 servers.

Even users’ machines are way more powerful. Users have high speed connections with unlimited data and huge hard drives. Because of Windows Vista, even non-gamers are putting 4Gb RAM in their machines. This is great for us as developers in some ways. Running slick Flash and AJAX apps on clients machine is no longer a problem. We can be very creative, and deal with problems later as they arise.

Too often traditional computer science techniques are being thrown out the window. This is tolerated because of the cheap power we can buy. A shortfall in the code or architecture is simply fixed by adding hardware. Twitter blew up so fast their initial poor design had to be tweaked many times. To this day, they have some questionable design elements in their architecture and it shows. Fail Whales and slowdowns are part of the daily routine of twitter users.

I am not saying we can’t or shouldn’t take advantage of cheap hardware these days. I’m also not implying that the developers at Twitter are not smart, they certainly are. Spending hundreds of hours coding for problems you don’t yet have is a huge waste of time. But a good artecture basis is imperative, so that changes can be made with minimal impact to users.

This is definitely a dying art, but its importance will become more evident as mobile computing becomes more relevant. More and more users are browsing sites on smart phones and net books. These are less powerful appliances by nature, and are usually coupled by slower 3G data transfer speeds. That means bandwidth is now becoming slower and more expensive again. Storage becomes a premium again. Developers will need to be more mindful of their bandwidth and storage usage when writing code.

Finally I want to briefly mention a story I was talking about with a colleague today. In 2006, users were racking up huge data fees downloading mobile maps. Google assigned a room of their best engineers to the issue, and could not come up with anything. Then one young designer came up with the idea to simply reduce the amount of colors on the maps from 256 to 20-40. Users didn’t notice, and amount of binary data to transfer was greatly reduced. It was heralded as being genius and a breakthrough idea. Granted it is smart, but do you honestly think a room of old school DOS or UNIX developers would not have thought of this sooner? Tricks like this have been around forever.

What do you think? Should you code away at your users expense, or be more mindful of conserving resources? And if you are in school or recently graduated, tell me if I am completely wrong and maybe you were taught to focus on good design.

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Semi-weekly wrap up of links, tidbits, and other sites that came across my plate.   Code, development, management, anything I found interesting since the last post.  Feel free to suggest other links in the comments.

Web Tools

• 15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools – Most people are going to be familiar with these tools, especially if you found this blog, but nonetheless, its a good list to keep handy. Even if you keep the list to help new junior developers setup their browsers for development.
• Free Web Resources – I only recently bookmarked this site, and follow it briefly. So far what i’ve seen has been borderline. I will add it to my RSS reader and give it a few weeks. Does anyone read this site?

Web Talk/Blogs

• The Most Powerful Word is No – Short message from 37Signals about saying NO.
• How to Be a Program Manager – Good article about a program manager and why good software teams need one. I would refer to this role as a Product Manager, and I plan to post my thoughts on Product Vs Project Managers roles in Web Development soon.
• Web Development is Moving On – Are you? – I really like this article. Talks about the changes in Web Development, and how we need to change with it to remain relevant. I recommend reading this article.

Web Tips/Resources

• Top 5 Sites To Learn Some CSS Programming – Good list of some intro sites for beginner CSS.
• 9 Common Usability Blunders – Anyone developing web software should keep these basics in mind when designing UIs.

Post any good resources or links you use in the comments.

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Today, I am going to post a little weekly wrap up of links, tidbits, and other sites that came across my plate. Anything that I found useful, and aids web development and/or team management.  This will not be a huge list of links, it will be tools I actually find to be practical and useful as a web developer and manager.  Sometimes it may be a blog post, sometimes a full featured web app.  I will post more as I accumulate them from week to week. Since this is my first of these, I am digging into my arsenal of delicious bookmarks to grab some old favorites of mine.  So you may have seen some before (possibly awhile ago), but others may be new to you.  Feel free to suggest other links in the comments.

Web Tools

Web Talk/Blogs

Web Tips/Resources

Post any good resources or links you use in the comments.

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We use BaseCamp here for managing projects. It is extremely popular, so I am not going to go into a detailed tutorial of its benefits. It has really made keeping track of projects and their status a breeze. We even use the API to run custom reports that fit our needs.

When first proposed, I was resistant to using a new piece of software for fear it would slow us down, and ‘cramp our style’.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  This software keeps everyone updated and reduces the need to remind individuals of their responsibilities and upcoming due dates.  We use it for all groups on a project, not only the tech team.  You can even invite users and clients outside your company to participate on specific projects.  So far we have received very good response from both internal and outside groups.  I suggest you try BaseCamp or something similar.  BaseCamp is by no means the only software of this type out there.  This space is growing more and more as web development moves towards a more agile and iterative style.

Don’t get me wrong, BaseCamp is not perfect. Sometimes it is too simple, even though this is by design.  It is meant solely to assist and not get in the way of a project.  Some people might prefer software that does a little more, or has more reports and graphs.  I personally find status graphs/charts useless and often ignored, and any additional reporting needed is easily customized by using their API.

Does anyone have a favorite of theirs, or better yet, have you tried BaseCamp and another project collaboration product and would like to share your comparison?  If so, feel free to discuss with us in the comments.

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