Funding Driven Development (FUDD)
We live in a quick-fix society so it’s no wonder that many startups especially in technology look for the magic cure to increase their sales or get funding for their projects. These projects follow funding driven development methodology. And here are few symptoms of FDD :
- Most of these products start looking for investors even when the core benefit web app is not properly conceptualized.
- The product manager spends more time with PR,investors and newspapers than with developers.
- The milestones for the project are strictly based on the next press release, media interview or conference.
- Instead of driving real people and customers to sales pipeline, you meet people who are not your target audience.
- They always think of raising capital and use major part of that in increasing/improving your sales force.
- They lack patience and you dont want to wait for few quarters to reach the right feature set after product launch based on feedback.
- They are least bothered about the backend and focus on UI. As long as the site looks cool , you are okay with that irrespective of the quality of code running in the backend.
- Instead of a single marketing launch, They have a series of launch with some new stupid feature everytime which nobody needs in every launch.
- When investors see PR stuff of your project, they expect significant momentum which usually is not there.PR is not writing code. You can not try it, iterate, learn, and try again.
- The founders feel great when they are covered by leading media instead of significant release that improves their product.
- They don’t understand the value of an early release, release often.
Reporting the first full day Ruby Event in India: The Ruby FunDay
The First Ruby FunDay was held at Impetus Technologies, Noida on 22nd November 2008.
There was a lot of Ruby and a lot of fun.
It was an exciting event with a good number of developers in attendance.
People from various companies already working on Ruby formed the largest part of the attendees. Then there were a few Java programmers, who had come to checkout ruby or so it seemed to me. Also there was a group of students from PantNagar College of Technology. I really appreciate their coming all the way from PantNagar for the Ruby FunDay.
The event started off with Sur doing a presentation on Ruby, though he intended to cover metaprogramming, but a battery of questions from the audience didn’t allow him to go beyond the basics. Particularly developers from a java background were having a hard time embracing Ruby’s open classes and duck typing. Everybody enjoyed Sur’s session a lot as he let code answer audience questions.
Then we had a presentation from Aditya Babbar of Impetus Technologies. He talked about the problems faced in deploying and managing a Rails app. He didn’t speak about only the problem, but demoed a solution which Impetus has worked on to alleviate that pain.
Sid showed us how he used to make a Rails app multilingual using Gibberish before Rails added I18n support. Then he showed how life had become easier with Rails 2.2’s in-built internationalization support. His slides are online at slideshare.
After Sid’s session we were served a splendid lunch made at the Impetus Cafeteria.
Right after lunch, was the one of the most awaited sessions of the day. Gaurav built an AIR client for his fictitious app called Blabber! It is just a co-incidence that the application name sounds like Yammer. You can see the details of his presentation on his blog here.
Then Rishav gave a presentation on Sphinx, using Thinking_Sphinx plugin. He showed all the Full text search capabilities of Sphinx, and also proved why thinking_sphix is a better plugin than ultra_sphinx for beginners atleast. His presentation is online at slideshare
Akhil’s session was the last technical session of the day. He carried on Rishav’s introduction to Sphinx to show how Faceted browsing works with Sphinx. You can find his slides also on slideshare
And then we had the musical extravaganza. Sur and Hemant with help from everybody else present at the event, put up a great show with a guitar and their melodious voices.
A lot of presenters were presenting for the first time, but did a really great job. To say the least, we can expect the event to improve as we organize subsequent editions. It feels really great to be involved with starting Ruby FunDays in India.
To read a more detailed review, go to Ritu’s blog.
VinSol’s certified Scrum Master
Aditya is VinSol’s first certified Scrum Master.
Ever since he completed his training, we have had a much better control over and understanding of the Scrum process that we use for our projects, leading to a much better control over our projects.
Thanks to Aditya, the wall just across my cabin is now full of Product Backlogs, Sprint Backlogs, Burn
Down Charts and post-it notes which move from “not started”, “working” to “done” columns.
As it became evident in the Sprint Retrospective meeting, the biggest advantages for me after implementing scrum at VinSol were “More accountability for everybody (whether a chicken or a pig, refer the commited vs. involved Scrum joke)” and
“More insight into the development progress at any point of time”
The sprint retrospective meeting looks like we are taking some exam.