I don’t think we’re so screwed.  I do think he’s right that display advertising will drop, but only for a while.

Too good not to post:

The creator of Get your war on is the same guy who has an unstoppable fighting technique.

Not everything he says is wrong, but enough of it is. So without further ado:

He says that You’re doing it wrong if…

• You’re not building atop an open-source framework
• • Whatever, it’s okay not to use a framework. And if you don’t count Smarty as a framework, then you really don’t ever need a framework.
• You’re writing your own framework upon which to build
• • Agreed, that’s probably stupid.
• You’re not using an ORM layer
• • Wrong.  You do not need to use an ORM layer.  If anything, your life will be more painful later as you figure out that many of your bottlenecks are abstracted out of sight and are hard to uncover.
• You’re writing your own ORM layer
• • Agreed, but only because you don’t need an ORM layer.
• You believe you can write it faster or better or more efficiently than any available library
• • Chris has clearly never used a Ruby Gem or CPAN or PEAR. Much of it is slow, buggy garbage.
• You have more than one developer on your project and no written coding style guidelines
• • A style guideline won’t make up for crappy programmers.
• Your bug tracker serves as your functional scope or your development roadmap
• • A tool is just a tool. It’s how you use it that matters.
• You aren’t using source control
• • This is to vague to be useful.  There are also crummy forms of source control, sadly.
• You comment the what but not the why
• • If you have to comment the why, you are definitely doing it wrong.
• You tend to pass properties instead of instances to functions
• • Maybe in your language.
• Your “deployment procedure” involves any combination of FTP and/or drag n’ drop
• • Protocols are irrelevant, process is what matters.
• You write code in a manner that cannot be unit tested
• • If you rely on unit-testing, you are setting yourself up for a rude awakening.
• Your primary method of code reuse is copy/paste
• • If you spend half your time ensuring you DRY, you are wasting your time.
• You don’t read any development blogs focused on your primary and secondary languages or technologies
• • You are probably spending too much time reading blogs.
• You haven’t been to a conference or birds-of-a-feather meeting in the past year
• • Once you become the expert, the value of most conferences approaches zero, unless you use it as a recruiting tool.
• The only code you read at work is your own
• • Agreed.
• You worry that some day someone else will read your code and know it was written by you
• • This is not a problem.  Everyone has a coding style, it’s like a fingerprint.  Don’t try to avoid it.

I’m curious to see what you have to say. Agree with Chris? With me? Or maybe you disagree with both of us…

I’ve heard that claim before. In fact, I’ve heard both sides of it. I’ve heard engineers complain that the non-engineering side of the house isn’t doing anything to help the business and I’ve heard the non-engineering side complain that none of the engineers are doing anything to help the business. I’ve never seen a situation where either of those assertions was correct. I told my friend that whenever I’ve been confronted with this problem it has always been a symptom of a larger organizational problem relating to a lack of clear strategy and goals. I know this because I’ve been responsible for creating problems like this (and hopefully fixing them).

If you believe that people on your team generally want to do a good job and be successful then hearing people groan about other people not working is a good indicator that your team is unclear on the objectives or aren’t working on the right things. These are both management problems, neither of which is the fault of the employees.

Fixing these kinds of problems aren’t easy, but they are doable. I’ll see what I can write-up about this in a later memo. But for now, remember that if you hear people grumbling about other people not working, it’s probably a much more serious problem. Of course, if you do have people on your team who aren’t working out you’ve got to let them go as soon as possible. But that’s a problem every manager learns the hard way very early on.

Yesterday, Embarq’s CEO (owned by Sprint) stated that customers were notified two weeks before a program launched that would look at every website a user visited at a detailed level to extract keywords and other metadata about what they are viewing so that advertisements can be better targeted to them. It turns out he lied. The “notice” that customers were given was a two paragraph update posted deep on the Embarq website buried in their Terms of Service. This is unacceptable. And Embarq’s CEO, Thomas Gerke, justified it by saying:

“Embarq followed the prevailing industry practices of the most similar business model, that of online advertising networks, which also collect anonymous information across multiple unrelated Web sites and use it to serve personalized display advertisements, using this same mechanism for providing notice and choice.”

This is not at all a standard industry practice. What publishers do on individual websites is very different from what the ACCESS PROVIDER you pay for Internet access does. Let me give you an analogy that fits perfectly to what he says is acceptable and a prevailing industry practice.

The United States Postal Service has decided that they are going to open up every letter you receive and quickly scan it for keywords and intent, building a profile of what kinds of correspondence you get and what your interests are. This would include everything from bank or credit card statements to a personal letter from a loved one. They are then going to stuff your mailbox full of relevant advertising. Perhaps your mail indicates that you need help getting out of debt, or finding a divorce lawyer. Of course, following industry standard practices, the US Postal Service has updated their terms of service and you can opt-out by going to your local post office and filling out a form.

Does that seem like an acceptable practice to you?

Password Guidelines
Passwords must:

• Be six to twelve characters
• Contain at least one number
• Contain at least one letter
• Not be identical to your first name, last name, company name, company ID, user ID, or your previous six passwords
• Not use the names of the months (example: march123)
• Not repeat the same character three or more consecutive times (example: 2kaaa3, 0000abe49)

They also make you change your password every 60 days. Do you know what this results in? Me writing down my password on a piece of paper next to my desk. Seriously. That’s how stupid it is. Oh, did I mention that if you fail your login three times they will lock-out your account?

Needless to say, this is not how you should be developing secure web applications.

Here’s why:

1. When your only feedback loop is your board of directors and your employees you will never develop a product that your customer wants.  Nor will you ever feel ready to launch.
2. If there is a market need for your product, but your product doesn’t quite meet the market’s needs when you launch, you will get their faster by quickly iterating over customer feedback.
3. Related to #2, if you spend months or years developing a service, it’s easy to get lazy or burned out.  When your customers are demanding a better product, it’s puts the fire under your belly.  This may be one of the best reasons to launch early.
4. At any given time, someone else is building a product that will be better than your current one.  This is why you have to also launch often.
5. Revenue.  Regardless of how much money you have or how much you’ve raised, launching early gives you maximum run rate to start generating revenue.  And often times, launching will start to bring about buzz and inquiries about partnerships which may be revenue-producing.  You don’t know about those things until you launch.

The problem I’m seeing is that by and large people are misunderstanding the point of these heatmaps.

A heatmap tells you WHAT someone is doing but not WHY they are doing it.  In one example, someone showed me a heatmap that indicated that almost all the people on the site clicked on the product tour button on the top right and nobody clicked on the pricing text link on the bottom left.  The person showing me the heatmap concluded that people care more about seeing the product before they consider pricing.  He may be right, but it’s also equally possible that people were simply missing the link to the pricing information.

I’ve got more to say on this subject, and the larger issue of people understanding why people do the things they do on a website, but that will be covered in future memos.

For now, I’ll leave you with this story: An enterprise software company with a product in the six-figure price range was having a hard time qualifying leads on their website. They did the typical marketing stuff like putting a “Tell us about you” form in front of their whitepapers. But of the 100s of downloads they had per week, there was no way to qualify the leads. They realized that if they tracked people who first went to the careers page on their Website and then later downloaded a whitepaper the person was probably more interested in a job with the company than buying the product. If the person checked out the customers and success stories section of the site before downloading the whitepaper, it was a probably red-hot lead.

This is the science and thinking that has to go into analytics, and it something a heatmap would never tell you.

Hi David,

It has been wonderful using everyDNS so when i heard about openDNS, i configured my office network to use it. Its interesting to know that even here in Nigeria, where Internet can be relatively slow, there is a considerable improvement when openDNS is used.

Have fun!

Well, at least I don’t think I’ve been helping any 419′ers… This guy seems like a good netizen based on the domain names in his EveryDNS account.

But a startup is about one thing — Big risk == Big reward. That’s why we are creating businesses.  That’s why we are changing industries.  That’s why we work our butts off.  If you don’t have health insurance (as they claim happens at a startup) you are working at the wrong company.  If you are destroying your family (as they claim happens at a startup) then you are working at the wrong company.

Bottom line:  37 Signals is full of baloney, spreading misinformation and I can only guess it’s to try and stem competition.  They don’t want to encourage innovation, they want you to stop innovating so they can take their time to innovate slowly. If you’ve ever used their apps, you know how weak-sauce they are.  So weak is their sauce that the first demo of Google App Engine was a quickly-made clone of their Campfire application.  37 Signals whined about and resulted in it being taken down.   What a bunch of jokers.