Erics Tech Blog » Musings

Choosing a Product By Roadmap

eric — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:56:45 +0000

There are a lot of reasons to choose a specific technology. You can decide based on what skills you or the engineers around you have. You can decide on a new technology because it’s the right tool. But there are times when all other things are equal and the flip of a coin would suffice. And in my mind, that’s when it comes to choosing the right technology based on a roadmap.

Recently, at SimpleReach, we were looking into a rather large decision of a backend data store that can be used for data mining. We took a look at the usual suspects in this arena to include Cassandra, Mongo, and HBase (just to name a few). Without getting into the technical details of any of this (since that isn’t what this post is about), it came down to Cassandra and HBase (and we ended up going with Cassandra).

The more interesting thing to note is not that we ended up with Cassandra, but what we used to make that decision. When it came down to Cassandra and HBase, they both had their pros and cons for our use/case. In fact, it’s likely that either one of them would have worked out just fine in the long run. We actually made our decision based on the community and the roadmap (but mostly the roadmap).

The product roadmap is simply something that says where the product is intending to be in the next few weeks, months or years. And it can be important because if the product roadmap in 12 months is in alignment with where you see your technology in 12 months, then it would seem like a pretty good fit. And it potentially allows your organization to help influence the development of new technologies. I’m sure some of you are thinking that it’s no fun being the guinea pig or being on the bleeding edge of everything. But when you are pushing the limits of today’s technology stacks and applications, you have to be on the cutting edge every now and then.

Product roadmap doesn’t just tell you about the application itself, it tells you about the community. If you see yourself aligned with the roadmap in the next 12-24 months, then you are also aligning yourself with the community. And the community is hopefully full of people that have a like-minded set of goals for the use of the product in question. So don’t just think about what’s good for you now, think about what going to be good for you (or your organization) in the future too.

DNS Staying With The Times

eric — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:00:42 +0000

My company signed a contract for a provider that uses TZO as their DNS provider. Now I have used TZO before (circa 2006-2007) and although their interface was archaic and there was no API, I accepted it because I was told they were reliable. As it happens, the service was fantastic and they are very reliable. I don’t think the service went down once the entire time I was using them. I ended up leaving the company and never saw the API or new interface come to fruition.

Fast forward 3+ years to 2010 and my current company is setting up our domains on TZOs portal which (despite the promise) hasn’t been updated at least since 2006. That’s fine, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But the problem is, it is broke. I couldn’t even an a TXT record. Then when I asked about it on a Friday, didn’t receive an answer until Tuesday. And that only because I pushed for it. In 2010, how can a major DNS managed service provider not have support for adding arbitrary TXT records? And they additionally don’t even have an API to make calls to so it can be done outside of the interface.

I don’t know how many clients in total they have lost, but I know the answer is at least 1. So this forced us (my company) to look around for another provider. After looking at a bunch of them and bringing in price and functionality into the mix, we believe that we have decided on Dynect. It is so far one of the best bang for your bucks that we have come across. Between myself and a few people on staff, we have experience with a few different providers (mostly small) and none of them cut it. We ruled out the big ones like UltraDNS since they were cost-prohibitive. But Dynect has all the major features that we are looking for:

Multiple Anycast servers
API
Relatively usable interface
DNS Load Balancing capability with health check
Reporting (either via API, graphs, or logs)
Geo Load Balancing
Full management control (including the ability to add TXT records)

The moral of the story is twofold; 1) poor support goes a long way, just as great support goes a long way, 2) sometimes reliable service only gets you so far. These items were the tipping point for us to go somewhere else. This goes back to something I hear 37signals tell people all the time, “Don’t expect other people to use and pay for something that you wouldn’t use and pay for yourself.” I just can’t see the people at TZO thinking the same old interface is still usable years later.

Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful

Changing Shoes For A Redesign

eric — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:45:49 +0000

The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add a shortcut search box where there wasn’t one before? Maybe you remove the advertising or move the place that the ads are located so that they are less intrusive…

The idea is that every so often you need to take a step back. Looking at your application from your users perspective may well change how your entire application works. I’m not saying this from a statistical analysis of the way people click and heatmaps and all that good stuff (though they do have their applications), I’m saying just a pure usability test from another perspective. Where do the new users look? Where do they click? What’s the first thing they want to go to? Are you putting them through information overload?

So take a step back, change shoes and take a fresh look at your app. No statistics, no heatmaps, no preconceived notions about the problem you are trying to solve (I know this is easier said than done). Just remember why you wrote your app in the first place. Try the passion on for size again and see if that doesn’t stir things up a bit.

No related posts.

Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful

eric — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:45:48 +0000

The internet us the ability to not while keeping up the appearance that we do. Now that’s not to say that you should be a know it all, but you should definitely know how and where to get information if you need it. If you use a specific open source technology at work, then you need to know how to support (because odds are, it was written by a few interested people and doesn’t have a company behind it). So you should know where the forums are, where the documentation is, where the mailing lists and the mailing list archives are, etc. Do they have an IRC channel where you can talk to live users who might be able to help on a more immediate basis? Maybe there was an even a book written that you can get your hands on, a PDF, or even a screencast. If you lucky, you might write a Tweet about your frustration and one of the products creators will answer (which happened to me recently).

The best part about all this is the internet is the enabler. It’s searchable, indexed and provides you many methods of finding the answer to your (or other peoples) questions. Why am I telling you all this obvious information? Because its why I write my blog. People who need help need to be able to search for it. Most of the things I write about here are specific problems with answers that I figured out or aggregated from reading various things around the web. So be resourceful, use what’s out there and then document it. You may save yourself (and maybe me) a lot of time.

What Does Web 2.0 Mean To You?

eric — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:00:24 +0000

I have been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and trying to decide what exactly Web 2.0 means. What massive advancement in an emerging technology called the internet advocates an increment in major version number?

Some people say its the looks. The new feel of the internet with crazy CSS and rounded corners and a lighter more airy feeling. I don’t think that’s it.

Some people say that its the AJAX layer that has been added to the internet. This refers to the layer of interactivity a page web page can give you. I don’t think it’s this either.

But this is a technical blog, so one might be expecting a technical answer, right? Well, it’s not always technical. In my opinion, the term Web 2.0 basically encompasses 2 ideas:

Search
Low barrier to entry

I heard an interesting quote a while back (that I don’t know who said it), “The internet is like a library where all the books are strewn on the floor.” This is a reference to the internet of old with lots of unindexed and unsearchable pages. Yahoo! was around, but had very little of the internet indexed. Then along came the “big bad” Google and indexed much of the web and made is massively searchable. All of a sudden, the average person could find what they need. Not only could they find what they needed, but they could also find what they want. And best of all, they could find it quickly. And human nature is always, I want what I want and I want it now.

But that’s not all that happened. The other big ticket item is that not only could the average person find what they want quickly, but they could contribute. They could contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia, their photos to Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Picasa, and their ideas to blogs, micro-blogs, and podcasts. And to circle back to reason number one; it’s all indexed, searchable, and easy to find. Now there are many search engines and many methods for people to share their ideas and find others who share their views and opinions.

All these ideas bring the world closer together. That, in my mind, allows a major version number bump. What does Web 2.0 mean to you? Do you think that the version number bump is premature or unwarranted?