Over recent months I’ve spent a few hours playing around with SQL Azure, Silverlight and WCF RIA Services. Nothing serious, just seeing if I could store some data in the cloud within a SQL Azure database and then get that data into a Silverlight application running in a browser. I toyed with the idea of creating the new company website as a Silverlight application and so wanted to play around to see how practical it would be. It would be a good chance to learn more about the technologies as well as making the website unique compared to the competition.

I quickly realised it would take more time than I had available. It also have the disadvantage of expecting all site visitors to either already have or be willing to install Silverlight. I don’t want to alienate some visitors by having a Silverlight install request as the first thing they see.

Turns out there is another good reason not to bother. Now that Windows Azure and SQL Azure are live it seems Australia has not been invited to the party. If your company is based in the US, UK, Japan, Germany or a good many others then you could sign up. Australia? Thanks but no thanks. You have to wait until some unspecified time in the future before you can use our service.

Good job I dropped the Silverlight idea.

I’ve just started a graduate course in business and part of my first assignment is to interview an existing business owner. Does anyone out there own a small business and would they mind if I email them a few questions? It is only a fairly high level set of questions and should take no more than 5 minutes to answer. Thanks.

Spectator Sport

It’s not often that you get to be a spectator during the early stages of a start-up. Usually by the time a company appears on your radar it’s already past the start-up phase and into growth. I bet that companies like Twitter and Facebook already had millions of users before you first came across them. But Joel Spolsky has given us the chance to watch a start-up at the earliest stages.

The Players

StackOverflow has been running for a little while now and has established itself as a part of the programmers online community. If you’ve never heard of the site then definitely check it out. I have used it myself and received some good answers that helped in my work.

From comments made by Joel and co-founder Jeff Atwood it would seem that although the site is a success, something like 6 million unique visitors per month, it does not make a ton of money. In fact comments from Jeff on his blog and podcast would indicate it barely makes enough to pay himself and couple of other programmers a liveable wage. So they have expanded on the idea by releasing a hosted service so you can create your own question and answer site called StackExchange. This is a paid for service so they make some money whether your own site is popular or not.

At this point they have a couple of options. Either bootstrapping  using internal resources or rolling the dice by taking outside funding. Joel has taken the bootstrapping route with Fog Creek Software. Founded in 2000 they have grown steadily to 34 employees and now have a range of different products including the well known FogBugz.

For StackOverflow it seems that Joel and Jeff are instead looking to raise venture capital money. Feedback on this has been generally negative with this post by David Heinemeier Hansson being a particularly scathing response.

Once Joel and Jeff sign on the dotted line for funding they are committed to either becoming large and profitable or instead dying. A VC has absolutely no interest in an investment that pikes along making a small profit. In fact they have a name for these investments, the walking dead. If you managed to become a 10 person company with profit of $300k per year the VC would consider that a failure and insist you take big risks to become much much bigger. They would insist on rolling the dice again.

The Patsy

For Joel this is a great approach. He already has a company slowly making him rich and so it makes no sense to bootstrap another in a way that makes no impact on his personal wealth. He might as well roll the dice and see if he can knock it out of the park. Jeff is the patsy in this scenario. For Jeff this is a terrible idea. There is a 90% chance the attempt to go big will fail and then he ends up losing everything he has built up so far. He is back to square one and looking for a permanent job again. Maybe he could apply to Fog Creek Software?

Last Note

Joel knows this is a big risk and that is why he wants to risk others money and not his own. Fog Creek Software has 34 employees and if you estimate it makes a profit of $30k per employee [1] then they are making $1m profit per year. Split that between two founders and staff bonuses and you still get, lets say, $250k per year for Joel. There is no doubt that Joel could spend $500k of his personal money if he really believed it was a winner. If he really believed in the success of his ideas then he would spend that to retain ownership of the equity.

[1] The $30k profit per employee is probably a big underestimate if you look at proxies like the $500k they spent outfitting the new offices they have.

Subversion Sucks

Until now I have been using Subversion for my source code management. To avoid using the command line tools I also used VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN which provide an easier user interface for usage with Visual Studio and the Windows Explorer respectively.

After using this setup for some time I have decided that it sucks. I often wait a couple of weeks before checking in my latest batch of changes (yes, I know I should probably do this every day). You can bet that checking in will give some weird problem with an error message that is almost useful but not quite. Then you spend what feels like forever trying to work out the reason. And every time it turns out to be something different.

This is before mentioning the vast annoyance that is the overlay icons. The idea of the TortoiseSVN shell extension is that you get nice add/remove/unchanged style icon overlays when looking at your files. So you can easily see what has changed. Do they work? Not really. Most of the time they are correct but sometimes they are just plain wrong. I don’t like looking at the icons and knowing they might be lying to me.

So I’ve dumped Subversion. I know that some of you are going to point out you have used it with success for several years and the problem is the operator. You’re quite right but I am still dumping it and trying out something different.

Mercurial for Windows

The latest fad in source code control is the use of distributed systems such as Git, Mercurial and Bazaar. So I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and opted to give Mercurial a chance. The download at TortoiseHG comes with Mercurial and the TortoiseHG shell extensions in a single installer. I only started using it a few days ago but so far it has been very simple and easy to use. Even the icon overlays have been correct so far.

To get started yourself read this online introduction and download from here.

I have finally joined up with Facebook and am probably the last developer in the world to do so. I never really thought there was much point as I have no interest in sharing pictures of skate boarding ferrets (although having said that it does sound quite impressive if you have indeed managed to train your ferret to skate board).

I have added by profile link on the sidebar of the blog so anyone that is interested in software development and business development should feel to ‘friend’ up.