Category Archives: rants

Ten Things I’ve Learned in a Start-Up

Ten things I’ve learned as a developer at WooMe:

Be clear what your dir­ec­tion is. Identify your key pro­pos­i­tion and focus on it. Don’t get dis­trac­ted by unre­lated fea­tures — some­body else is prob­ably already doing those bet­ter than you.
Be mer­ci­less with fea­tures that don’t cut it. No mat­ter how much you like it, if your audi­ence doesn’t

Bingo We Can Believe In

Alcohol and polit­ics are two things that should rarely mix, but once in a blue moon there’s cause to throw cau­tion to the wind and get a little crazy.
One such occa­sion is tomor­row night, when the US elect­or­ate takes to the polls and — with a little luck — elects Barack Obama their next President.
There

The End of the Line

About 10 days ago we had our inter­net con­nec­tion activ­ated at Awesome Manor. It’s Be Internet’s (up to) 24Mb all-you-can eat buf­fet pack­age.
Problems, nat­ur­ally, began imme­di­ately. During the nor­mal period of line test­ing that the ADSL2+ products use to determ­ine the max­imum stable rate of the line, we saw massive instabil­ity and fluc­tu­at­ing speeds from

BBC Made of Fail? No, definitely not.

A couple of days ago I wrote an opin­ion piece on why I feel that being forced to duplic­ate exist­ing soft­ware pro­jects due to an anti­quated and lim­ited infra­struc­ture is a large part of the reason the BBC is fall­ing far behind the rest of the industry in its inter­net offer­ings.
To put this in con­text,

Perl on Rails — Why the BBC Fails at the Internet

Perl on Rails is a pro­ject by the smart chaps over in BBC Audio and Music Interactive that rep­lic­ates the Ruby On Rails MVC frame­work in Perl. They’re obvi­ously rather proud of them­selves, and I under­stand that intern­ally the pro­ject is mak­ing waves. Whilst I applaud the tech­nical achieve­ment of the indi­vidual developers, I deplore