Chris McMahon's Blog

The Register has probably the best coverage so far. This license is particularly valuable where the market is saturated with competitors, and for companies offering "software as a service". OSI did the right thing, I think.

Socialtext has a tradition of having " Wiki Wednesday " once a month, where people hack little wiki-related projects. I had a little Wiki Wednesday myself today. Socialtext wikis have a very nice (and not very well documented ) REST API. I've been figuring out to use this API in Ruby. I got to the point today where I could read and write pages to the wiki, so I hacked up a little framework using Watir that reads test data from one page and updates another page with the results of the tests. Wiki markup makes parsing the data really easy, and the REST API makes updating pages really easy. @test_data_page looks like | Google Test | Google | Google Search | I'm Feeling Lucky | This displays as a table in the wiki. It's in dire need of some refactoring. Reading pages with more than one line of test data is left as an exercise for the reader. :-) If you want to muck around with it yourself, you could get a free account from socialtext , or try the open source v...

Ron Evans gets it...

This is cool. I've written letters about this in local (not available online) and international (October 2006) publications, it's great to see some serious action from people who might make something happen. The quality of life here is superb. There is a small but enthusiastic pool of talent. If you have a spectacular business idea; don't need too much funding; and the VC environment in Silicon Valley, NYC, Austin, Atlanta, or Chicago is too much of a freak show: come here.

Time magazine has a refeshingly hype-free short article about 37signals . Half of the company works remotely. First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees' time. "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity," he says. "We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done." Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago. At Socialtext where I work, most of the company works remotely. Socialtext sells wikis, and internally, the entire company lives, breathes, and evolves on wikis. The part about asynchronous (PUBLIC) communication is right on. Not o...

Apropos of my software-as-music analogy, Jonathan Kohl has another nice non-manufacturing metaphor, software development as theater . It makes a lot of sense, especially since Jonathon's point is actually about the value of improvisation in the course of developing and testing software. In software, improvisation saves time and creates new opportunities. On the factory floor or in the supply chain, improvisation is a disruption and causes chaos.

I'm starting a blog for the work I'm beginning do at Socialtext . It'll mostly be concerned with wikis , Selenium , FireWatir , Perl, and maybe a little Ruby. I'll probably be posting to this one a little less often, but you're welcome to read the other one if you'd like. A lot of the Socialtext development staff are keeping open work blogs, so mine fits right in.