Assembla Blog

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:52:05 GMT

We ran out of H-1B visas on the first day. US Immigration services received 150,000 applications for 65,000 H-1B visas, which are the visas most commonly used by programmers seeking to work inthe United States – as summarized by this Cnet story. Last year, it took two months to reach the same limit. What does this mean?

• America still is the land of opportunity. Our technology business has recovered, and we are ready to work. We need to bring in talented people to build and create our entrepreneurial businesses.
• Our government has converted this opportunity into a problem – a problem for employers, and a problem for offshore talent.
• It has become even more important to figure out how to effectively manage distributed teams, so that we can work our way around bureaucratic obstacles.

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 27 Jan 2007 11:53:00 GMT

We use trial projects to help find the best developers to work with. We hire candidates to do paid trial tasks from our live projects. In working with the candidates, we understand how good they are and how well the they work in our process. We try to sign the good ones for longer term contracts. It’s a lot of work, but it is well worth the effort.

Sometimes, clients want to do this themselves. Or, they want us to perform in a trial, which is a hassle for us, but a good idea for them. That brings us to the subject of how to select trial tasks. To make the process work, we need good trial tasks.

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:15:00 GMT

Recently we were called upon to build and launch a new Web product with a hard deadline in a seasonal business. By the time we started our work, only three months remained until the planned launch date. It was a big system. Our mission was to build a new and greatly enhanced version of a product which had taken 15 months to build in its last iteration. So, we had a benchmark.

In this case, we ran more than four times faster than a similar project implemented last year with older tools and development methods. We also came in on-time and under budget, and we ended up implementing features faster than we could figure out how to use them.

How did this happen? Want to try this at home? I will share our lessons below. Good luck.

• Don’t do things that take time to arrange
• Don’t get dragged down by old code
• Establish the data schema
• Pile on with new team members
• Use a ticket list / work queue
• Build something now, even though we know we will have to rebuild
• Don’t split the codebase into components
• Daily releases instead of stabilization periods
• Make a usage dashboard
• Web services are your friend
• Hire users as product managers
• Don’t create obstacles: Users provide the data
• Documentation on a wiki
• Find the one thing people will use

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:03:00 GMT

Read the full article at OnStartups

Here is a summary:

For 100 years, it has been a truism that “the best product doesn’t win. The product with the best marketing wins.” At the risk of being thrown out of capitalist society, I claim that on the Web, this is no longer true. The best product often does win, with virtually no marketing, if it is easy to adopt.

In this new product cycle, figuring out how to get users to adopt is the hard and expensive thing. Marketing serves the adoption work by bringing in the right number of prospects for us to experiment with.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:22:00 GMT

Less than a year ago I wrote an article titled “Is the Enterprise Software Licensing Business Dying�. It was originally posted on IT Managers Journal, but it got picked up by Slashdot and various bloggers and podcasters. It pointed out that enterprise buyers had stopped buying software licenses – the mainstay of the software industry. This caused years of misery for software professionals, years during which software was a bad business to be in. But the light at the end of the tunnel was apparent even then, in the form of new packaging and revenue models. Faster than I imagined, the prospects for the software industry have been transformed. We now have a wonderful alignment of good fundamentals – increasing demand, declining costs, and rapid innovation.

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Posted by andy Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:17:00 GMT

We have finally announced the new strategy and releases for Project.net, at OSBC on February 14. Over the next few months we will release open source, hosted on-demand, and enterprise packages based on this product. We picked up some nice articles in the press.

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Posted by andy Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:16:00 GMT

I have moved my own development mostly to dynamic languages Ruby and Python, and I can see that these languages have had a big jump in popularity over the past year. This is not a fad. It is a very real and permanent response to increasing developer productivity.

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Posted by andy Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:53:00 GMT

How can we design a business that will be it’s competitor’s worst nightmare, if not unbeatable, at least unbreakable. Put another way, how can you design a business that would be your worst nightmare if it became a competitor?

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Posted by andy Fri, 23 Sep 2005 13:50:00 GMT

I have recently spoken with a number of enterprise software companies about a raft of strategies for growing their businesses. The market for enterprise software (including hosted apps) is improving after a tough half-decade, but it still isn’t comfortable for vendors. Buyers still don’t like buying big systems because adoption …

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Posted by andy Sun, 14 Aug 2005 14:36:00 GMT

In 1999, there was a huge surge in interest in ASP’s for enterprise software. By 2001, pundits declared the model a failure. One analysis was that ASP’s wouldn’t be able to effectively service enterprise customers, because the systems needed to be customized and integrated, and doing so would …

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