How to start a career

I've been thinking about this alot lately.... what is the best way to start a career for a exceptionally talented and motivated IT student based in New Zealand at the moment?

I've come to the conclusion that there has never been a better time to put "do a startup" at the top of your list. I'm in a good position to comment on this cause I'm 27 and spent the last 5 years of my life doing just that. I jumped into founding a startup straight out of Uni at the ripe age of 22 and have never looked back.

The gap between 20 and 30 for a lot of us is our time of freedom, before we get married and have kids (well thats what my uni teacher told me!). For those of us that get excited by the thought of being an internet pioneer it has never been easier to give it a shot.

The recent house price spiral in NZ means that someone graduating today is going to be light years away from being able to afford a deposit on a house so why not forget about the joys of having a mortgage (if there are any?) and get cracking on that first start-up business.

OK, the odds are stacked against you becoming a millionaire but at least you'll get some runs on the board and learn way more than your peers that take a help desk job.

If you are looking for some motivation then check out the great articles that Paul Graham writes. Paul and a few others started a seed fund for hackers in the US last year called Y Combinator

I'll say it again, I reckon we need a Y Combinator in NZ. The thing I really like about Y Combinator which has been running for a year or so now is that they totally expect some of the ideas to "tank". One of the companies that got squashed, has just had its founders start another business which is now flying and is really cool!

I'd say the big difference between old tech startups and web 2.0 startups is the "time to fly". There seems to be a growing perception that 3 months is enough time to hack something together and go live. I'd agree with this, my first startup took 3 months of hacking in a bedroom with a friend to bring something great to fruition and that was 5 years ago. So that basically means you only need enough money to survive 3 months to get something going. The benefits of being a part of Y combinator is that you get introduced to all sorts of "angels" during that time and should have a decent amount of momentum at the end of that 3 months which can make a difference if you are broke!

So go do it, start a start-up!

Inside story from Xero

Just came across a great post from Kirk Jackson at Xero. He describes the new server and rich client technologies that will be released from Microsoft and how they may be used at Xero.

Xero is a Wellington based start-up looking to do big things in the Accounting 2.0 space, taking on the likes of MYOB. Xero is lead by local tech hero Rod Drury. Rod did a nice presentation about Interaction Design at the recent Mini Web Stock.

If you haven't heard of Xero then you soon will as Hamish Carter is their relationship man(ager)

Webstock video streams

I missed this event but was really cool to see they recorded all the speakers.
Awesome to see the current buzz in the Wellington internet & software community.

Apollo has landed

Adobe has just released the alpha version of Apollo 1.0 which is a cross operating system runtime that lets you easily install web enabled apps on your desktop that take advantage of HTML, CSS, AJAX, FLASH, FLEX and PDFs. The apps can be easily installed (and updated) on PC and Mac (and I'm guessing Linux pretty soon).

This is Macromedia's third attempt to get a runtime working that allows access to the local file system. Macromedia (prior to Adobe) had two versions of Central which never really got much adoption, they basically only allowed flash support.

One of the cool things about Apollo is the ability to allow apps to continue to work in an offline state pretty easily as there is good network state detection in Apollo.

I guess it is up to us now to build some killer desktop apps that take can now take advantage of the full web developer arsenal.

Time will tell if there are enough benefits to build apps based on the Apollo runtime or whether developers will rather build offline apps using the new features being built into Firefox 3. I don't think the fact that Apollo has access to the local filesystem is a big enough benefit on its own as how much data do you need to cache locally now that mobile broadband has become affordable.

Update - just read the Apollo for Flex Pocket Guide - bloody good overview of Apollo. The one thing that stood out is that Apollo is not a replacement (in a lot of cases) but a complement for your web based apps. I think its pretty cool from the few demos I've seen and can quite easily see that 2.0 versions of traditional office apps will take advantage of the ability to install into your startmenu or dock and get updates.

Really cool Flex components

Really cool to see some Flex developers pushing the envelope. Now we can all download and contribute to these as Flexlib is on Google Code. My favourite is the super tab bar -I'd like anyone try and do that as nicely and elegantly using AJAX.

Separation of Duties

So there are quite a few people comparing AJAX & HTML CSS technologies to Flex & Apollo at the moment.

My opinion is that if you are building a web application that contains content that doesn't need to be Google searchable you should seriously consider using Flex, especially if you are lucky enough to have dedicated developers and designers. There is a good article on Adobe.com that discusses this. It just makes sense, you can totally separate the development of your business logic from the presentation. You have the flexibility to get your analysts and designers on the ball while your developers are elsewhere. Or if the most important requirements are known and your designers are busy you can get your developers going on the business logic before the designers attack the interface.

Ok, so your customers will need to have Flash Player 9, so what, they can download it in 20 seconds and chances are they will already have it with adoption rates going through the roof. Flash Player 9 works within all the main browsers on Win, Mac and Linux.

Now on the other hand, if your content needs to be Google searchable, needs to be easily bookmarkable and doesn't contain state then HTML/CSS/AJAX is probably the better way to go. For sure you can wrestle your way to get bookmarks and state working but its not nice.

I predict we will see a closing of the gap soon as Mozilla starts to play with the donated AVM2 code from Adobe so that apps will be developed in a markup similar to MXML and be compiled at runtime so that content is fully Google searchable.

So its a safe bet investing the time learning to use the Flex platform. To close the door on Flex would be unwise for any software developmement company.

Am I biased? Not at all. I'm currently building websites using HTML+AJAX+JAVA and apps using FLEX+JAVA.

I welcome any comments.

OS becoming irrelevant

People have been predicting for years that operating systems will become irrelevant in the future as most applications go towards being based in a web browser. Finally in 2007, we are starting to see the swing happen ever so slowly.

The french parliament have just announced they are switching to Ubuntu with Open Office.

In my eyes I guess a couple of key things have happened
1) Firefox has given Microsoft a real run for its money. Linux browsers are now just as good
2) Adobe has released Flash Player 9 on Linux.
3)Apple went Intel and VM products like Parallels let you run two os's concurrently.
3) Broadband is becoming more affordable by the day
4)Mobile broadband is becoming faster and more affordable
5)Finally some development companies are starting to make apps work well in browsers

I guess there are a few parts of the equation to go, like running apps offline in your browser. There are a few apps that work ok offline but most break.

Startup 2.0

There is an interesting story in the UK Guardian this morning about startups now seeking smaller amounts of funding because they don't actually need a lot of money to get going. They reckon the activity of new startups in the UK is booming and doesn't look like slowing any time soon.

My favourite startup model is based around the funding given by YCombinator in the US - I reckon we need to get this sort of approach going in New Zealand pronto.

So why not give it a go? I know this is a pretty challenging thought for a Friday but have you considered that doing a startup is a viable first career move.

Skype just created a whole new service industry

Well not quite.... but now I can charge people for calling me over Skype using Skype Prime and it includes video calls. This is awesome and revolutionises how support can be provided for a fee to someone on the otherside of the world....all over the internet. Fantastic! If you think about how you can collaborate over Skype or any other web based tool then you'll see why this is so cool.

In a nut shell, the call is initially free, then the caller decides if they are prepared to pay either the "fixed fee or per minute call out fee" that the person is offering.

You get paid the money via Pay Pal who clip the ticket on the way through with their fees

The real world

It must be pretty exciting being a student in Wellington at the moment as we have a number of internet/software companies doing cool things - definately a lot happening to distract you from actually doing any work.

So how are you going to get noticed by these guys? Well for a start you've got to be good at what you do. There's no better way than just having a crack at something and then tapping a few people on the shoudler. The cool thing about Wellington IT companies is that the people running them are really approachable people. They've all been in your shoes and know what its like at the bottom of the ladder.

So the first company on your list that you should get to know is our local town hero - Trademe. And how are you going to do that? Easy, start reading Rowan Simpson's blog - I've let him know that there's a bunch of 3rd year students at Vic studing ASP.NET that are really keen to push the limits. He's kindly offered to have a go at answering any curly questions we might have.
Trademe is NZ's busiest website and runs on ASP.NET - so completely relevant.

I'll introduce you to some more cool companies each week as we start to ramp things up.

ASP.NET here we come

I'm going to start posting some blog notes on ASP.NET among other things to help you guys (my awesome 3rd year ELCM students at Vic Uni) get familar with the technology really quickly. I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and we should use this approach when developing web applications.

For those that don't know, Wikipedia is a great way to get a quick (and usually accurate) summary on any word/concept/whatever. So its a great start for getting some knowledge on ASP.NET. ASP was the first server side scripting language I learnt back in 2000. I then switched to the Java camp using JSP and then on to servlets which has done everything I've needed to since. For the last 4 years I've only really built Flash based applications & websites so getting response data in XML format only was the norm. I think using a Service Orientated Architecture is great and separating back end programming from front end development is the way to go..(more on this some other time).

So you'll notice there have been numerous releases of ASP. ASP.NET 2.0 is the current release. I think this course primarily teaches ASP.NET 1.0 using Visual Studio 2003. I'll need to check how we can get you guys using 2.0 ASAP as there is nothing worse that working with outdated technology particularly with server side languages. Those AJAX controls for 2.0 look especially cool. I'll see what I can do.

We can however do remote procedure calls without using AJAX - here's an easy example

AJAX components

I start tutoring a third year ASP.NET course at Vic Uni this week...In my preparation I have been checking out the ASP.NET AJAX control toolkit of GUI components. I'm pretty impressed at the quality of the components which will help with the user experience in developing kick ass HTML web sites.