So, here we sit, uncertain of our first steps….

Here at VendAsta, we’ve just kicked off our Friday afternoon jam sessions. Starting at noon, we bring in lunch and all get together in adhoc groups and work on projects of interest. Anything. Well, anything software.

It’s an odd feeling though to have all constraints lifted and actually believe that we can just go out and play, experiment, learn, research, anything.

But now the group is starting to self-organize and some ideas are emerging. I’m confident that these sessions will rock as people get going on things.

It’s gonna be great!

Code review is a vital mechanism for ensuring conventions and patterns, as well as spreading knowledge of solutions and technologies throughout a team.

We have been evaluating Crucible as a formal tool for tracking comments and laying the comments alongside the actual code. The cool thing is that it integrates (somewhat) with Fisheye, Jira, and Subversion - all tools that we use. However, it comes with a steep price tag, and its baked-in process is too heavyweight for our small Scrum teams.

So I recently went on a search for an alternative.

In short order, I came across rietveld, which has come out of Guido van Rossum’s 20% Google project (originally Mondrian). This app is built on Google App Engine and integrates with Subversion (along with Perforce from the original Mondrian days).

We’ll try it out and see how it goes.

The best side-effect: in rietveld, we have Guido showing us the best practices in building a Django app on App Engine! Best practice information in this space is hard to come by.

Google launched a limited access program for their Google App Engine. I landed solidly on the waiting list, but have been able to check out the local developer environment.

Bottom line: it’s very cool. It’s based on python with a very Django-like framework.

By far and away the coolest thing is the Google-proprietary Datastore/BigTable. This is Google’s approach to a database, except indexes, data replication, scalability, etc. are all managed for you. As an application developer, you can concentrate on your app logic and let the framework and infrastructure deal with these issues. Oh, and by the way, all the indexes and interfaces work exactly the same on the local dev environment as they do in this expansive Google compute cloud.

To be clear, in my experience with large webapps, data scalability and availability is precisely the place where a team will spend most of their time. The Google App Engine eliminates this for you.

This is a real testament to Google’s insistence and persistence on building out a world-class infrastructure and a super-solid architecture layer to build upon. Remember, this company did almost nothing other than search for the first 4 or 5 years. They had lots of employees back them too (not like today, of course), but instead of building out gobs of applications, they focused on the underlying architecture pieces and produced things like Datastore. This sort of investment has a massive flywheel effect over time.

Back to Google App Engine: it will be great to find out what G’s roadmap is for this product if one is seriously considering hosting their corporate apps. In the mean time, Google App Engine is a pretty serious endorsement for python/Django.

I love Ruby as a language, but damn I’m starting to have a tough time finding a place for Rails.

I have been lucky enough to work with very driven, intelligent, capable, talented people in my career. There is a weird side-effect of this. Often, due to a wide range of talents, these teams often find themselves building everything themselves. “We can do that, and no one can do it as well as us,” is a phrase that comes to mind.

As I see it, the problem with this philosophy is one of opportunity cost. In most cases the statement above is pretty much accurate - we can build it, and we can do a damn good job of it. In doing so, however, what have you not been able to do? That is, in the time you’re building project B, how much time has been taken from your primary project A?

Just because you can do something is not a good enough reason to actually undertake the work. Even if there is a small quality hit you take by outsourcing (which, by the way, likely won’t happen assuming the people that you enlist to help you are experts in their field), it is worth it to outsource in order not to rob time, energy and focus away from your primary goal. In everything you undertake, you should always be asking yourself, “Is this the highest value add work that I can be doing right now? By doing this work, am I taking away from work where I am truly the only one in the world who can do it?”

After answering those questions, hopefully there’s not an arbitrary cash flow reality that gets in your way of doing the right thing.