Jordy Blog

CTO Breakfast: October 2006

Utah Job Market, Collaboration, Product Life Cycles, and More (Oh my!)

I had a great time at the Phil Windley’s CTO breakfast this morning. (I’ve actually been anxious to go for months, but just haven’t gotten around to it until today.) It was fun to mingle, see old acquaintances, talk about current tech issues, etc. It was pretty informal, like sitting at a table with a few of friends, except the table is really big and there are a lot of friends. Everyone just chimes in about whatever they want to talk about, and Phil just facilitates. I imagine he’s a really good teacher.

There were lots of good discussions. I particularly liked hearing employers’ perspectives on hiring in the local job market. Basically, now is it a great time to be working tech in Utah. There are tons of openings to fill, and not near enough qualified people to fill them.

I also enjoyed a discussion on why Google Docs and Spreadsheets haven’t really taken off, despite being functional, relatively feature rich, and easy to setup and share. When it comes to collaboration, Google Docs really does make sense on so many levels that much of the group concluded that reluctance must stem from security and privacy issues. I think there might be some of that, but that doesn’t stop most of us from using Google for search, personal email, site analytics, and everything else. I’m personally starting to slow down on some of these Google-usage fronts, supposing that there really could be issues someday if Google were to become less benevolent; but I think for most non-nerdy people it’s a mute point, at least until they’re aware –which most people aren’t.

My analysis: I think online doc sharing just hasn’t reached a critical mass yet. It’s too new, and too early in the product life cycle, especially when other (albeit clumsy) solutions are already in place. I had the hardest time getting my classmates to use a wiki for collaborative writing, and that was only a year ago. I’m sure that some of them will use them in the workplace or on social networks now that they’ve tried it out, but it was a hard transition. A true WYSIWYG editor would have helped to level the learning curve a little, but long years of editing and forwarding email attachments have proven hard to shake, despite being a clearly inferior way to collaborate. But wiki, Google docs, and other newish collaboration software will be huge in no time. Just give the early adopters (geeks and nerds) some time to do their thing.

I also had a chance to plug the Utah Open Source Conference. I think there were a few people interested, but I also think people will want to see more concrete progress in Utah Open Source Conferences before there will be real widespread buy in. All in due time…

Anyway, CTO breakfasts are fun. I plan on coming a lot more often, and I hope you will too. :)

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WYSIWYG Wiki Wanted

I love wiki technology for its ability to allow collaboration on works in progress. I’ve used numerous wiki for work and on community projects, but nowhere did I find wiki colaboration more useful than on jointly-written college papers.

For my senior year capstone project I worked on a student team to crunch out a daunting 40 page paper analyzing everything about Netflix and its business model. There was no way our team members (who all had full-time work and attended school at night) could arrange our schedules to consistently work together at the same time. We had to do it from home, but we really didn’t want the hassle of losing pieces in email and having to merge 10 different versions of assigned chunks on the last day.

Our project wiki saved our collective butt. With it we could work remotely on one document, editing each other’s errors as we went, making sure we didn’t have duplicate content, patching our work together using a unified tone, etc. If you are a student that has to work on large group papers, please learn how to use wiki.

The only problem we had was that there was a bit of a learning curve, especially for the non-technical members of my group. That’s where a WYSIWYG editor would really have come in handy. I may be off here, but I think the real value of a wiki is the collaboration aspect. Collaboration trumps easy markup syntax, and a WYSIWYG editor would definitely make it easier for more people to contribute to a project. More editors means better content. That’s the real point of wiki, right?

My talented friend Tyler made a really smooth and simple Windows-based wiki that employed this principle. Could anyone recommend any good PHP, Perl, or Python-based WYSIWYG wiki packages for Linux? I wish MediaWiki offered some sweet WYSIWYG, but alas, it doesn’t –although the Wikiwyg project seems to be making some progress in that direction.

Online Word Processing with Writely

If you haven’t seen Writely (the beta online word processor) yet, you really should check it out. I think the “online platform” thing is going to be huge, and (although I love Excel) I hope Writely rocks proprietary Microsoft to its core. Writely looks sharp and is sure to grow with the funding and reputation of Google behind it.

Some things I like:

• Writely imports and exports to Open Office’s newly ISO approved OpenDocument files
• Writely automatically backs up your files every 8 seconds
• Writely supports multiple editors at once (a purpose for which I used wiki all through college).
• Writely versions your editions so you can easily revert to previous state.

One thing I don’t like:

• “WWW2″ right in the URL… It’s just too much.

I’m sure I’ll find other things I dislike as I try it out. Writely is free, but it won’t accept new users until June or July. I signed up for the mailing list to get an early crack at it.