The program is 10 sessions over 10 weeks.  Ours was on a Friday from 10 to 4.  Each session starts with an external speaker talk for an hour about their area of expertise, whether user testing, or agile product management, metrics, or other topics relevant to lean startups.   The speaker often stays for a few hours or even the whole day, which allows the team to talk to the expert about their specific issues.

After the speaker we do a quick standup meeting about progress made since last week and what the team is planning to do for the day.  After that it’s whatever your team needs to work on.  Josh Seiden, the program director, is around to help you work through blocks, or to help you frame a particular problem you are working on.  He has great experience both on the UX side and product side, so he is very helpful.  Our team has worked on big changes in navigation to our product, new alerting infrastructure, some smaller page redesigns.  Most importantly, the program helps the team build up capacity and gives us confidence to continue doing a better job both managing the product and thinking of way to improve user experience.

LUXr program itself has many branches, including in San Francisco.  Their mission is to help startups become better at producing usable products, and in addition to the residency programs, they have other workshops, and planning things like shorter video classes and other things.

Lastly, I already mentioned that Josh has been amazing as director of the program.  Seems like he intents to stay involved with LUXr, but he just announced a new venture, Proof, a new product development studio, which sounds amazing (his two partners, Giff and Jeff, were speakers at LUXr, so we got to know them a bit – they are awesome).   They have the dream team of New York UX / Product People working with companies to help them design better products and user experience.

I really enjoyed the LUXr program and would recommend it to any company that feels they need to improve their UX and / or product processes, no matter what stage they are in. Of the four companies in this batch, two companies were pretty late stage (we are two and a half years in with a reasonably mature product), and two were just starting up.

I thought that since my site is already sprinkled with g:link tags, the easiest way would be to override the original taglib. However, since the TagLibs are defined as closures, I couldn’t just subclass the original ApplicationTagLib.

I have already been able to override existing tags from before by bringing the implementation into the new Tag – grails gives you a message when it sees two tags with the same name defined, but picks the one from your application, correctly assuming that you are overriding the original implementation.

I found from this thread that to get a reference to the original taglib, I had to go through Spring applicationContext. In my initial implementation, I got a reference to the original taglib, and tried to call the closure. However, that caused a StackOverFlowException.

Thanks to the Grails User list, and more precisely Ian Roberts (post here), I got help, so here is my final code (as you can see, I am using Shiro).

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.taglib.*
import org.apache.shiro.SecurityUtils

class ModifiedLinkTagLib {

static namespace = "g"

def link = { attrs, body ->
   if (attrs.role=="edit" && (!SecurityUtils.subject.hasRole(EDIT_ROLE))) {
     return
   }
   def applicationTagLib = grailsApplication.mainContext.getBean('org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.taglib.ApplicationTagLib')
   applicationTagLib.link.call(attrs, body)
  }
}

Via Matt Raible’s post on Passionate Programmer book.

A bit of a change in focus, but as the technical part of the founding team, I hope that my experience will be useful as I am now building out a prototype version of the service.

I won’t promise that I will blog more, though I certainly intend to, including more about the service itself and what I am working on. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the transition from an employee, which I have been all my professional life, to an entrepreneur and how the two are different.

Very quickly, it’s become one of the best technical resources on the web, now whenever I have a generic question about programming, I go there and do a quick search (you can also map it as OpenSearch in your browser).  Of the past 10 such situations, there was already a thread there on the topic, with majority of responses very well reasoned.  A lot of great developers hang out there and there is a ton of useful information.  

In addition to frequenting the site, I also listen to the StackOverflow Podcast – the Signal to Noise ratio isn’t amazing, but it’s a good background conversation to listen to while doing something else.

In addition to the main topic, I also participated in Rich Internet Applications Panel, talking about interesting technologies such as Adobe Flex, Ajax and its cousin Comet.

As to the conference overall, I have to say that since my primary interest is software architecture and technology, I didn’t always find interesting topics that were immediately relevant (a few of the ones i really wanted to attend overlapped with my talks ).  However, this did allow me to branch out and hear about topics I am not as directly involved with, such as proving value of architecture, and establishing Architecture as a profession within our industry.

Upcoming Speaking Engagement June 12th – Enterprise 2.0 Conference

By the way, I am also speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.   The topic is Programmable Web: Consequences for the Enterprise.  I am on at 9:30 am on Thursday, June 12th.   Here is the Description:

The internet is becoming programmable. Many sites are providing data access APIs as the Software As as A Service paradigm shift is taking place. Mashups have been around for years, but recently social networking sites have also joined the fray by opening up their own APIs. Facebook is one of the leaders of the movement. Having released their API in May of 2007, there are many thousands of Facebook applications in use today. Google countered with OpenSocial Project. We will discuss the internet as an application development platform in general, and look at how some of the leading social networking APIs work. We will then discuss how these concepts can be applied in the enterprise to enable better information sharing and collaboration.

Microsoft makes software for so many different areas, it has many constituencies that are part of their community. There are developers – they care about development tools and new frameworks. In addition, there are database gurus, administrators of their various products, office users, enterprise users, etc. There are many demographics that apply, and obviously it is good to have them all as part of an ecosystem. I am most familiar with the developer community, but will try to cover other efforts as well. This post will introduce the community-run programs, and then examine the different programs and support structures that exist to help the community.

Community Programs

User Groups

These are pretty traditional user groups, just like other companies and technologies have. They meet about once a month and discuss topics of interest to that particular groups. There are several programs out there to reinforce them, about which I’ll talk below. To give you an idea of the different areas covered, here are the active groups in New York City:

• DotNET User Group
• Connected Systems Group
• Enterprise Windows Group
• SharePoint User Group
• SQL Server Group
• .NET Meetup (started recently by a company Lab49).

These groups are community-run in that their leaders (for the most part) are not associated with Microsoft in an official capacity. Microsoft does help out by providing space (and sometimes food). They also form a great basis for other community-run events, such as Code Camps (next section).

This is in NYC alone – there are similar groups in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and others. For information about their meetings, check out Peter Laudati’s blog, where he does a great job aggregating all the meetings on one page.

Code Camps

Code Camp is a free community-run, (usually) one-day event. It’s basically a mini-conference. Here is the original “Code Camp Manifesto”. The focus is on sharing knowledge and showing code. It usually happens on weekends, most often Saturdays. Here is the schedule of code camps.

Because Code Camps are held on a weekend, people are less tired, and Code Camps are usually well attended. There are usually several tracks, and each talk lasts an hour, to a maximum of an hour and fifteen minutes at some camps. They attract up to several hundred attendees. What is so nice about these is that it’s a great way to catch up on some latest technologies, and learn about things and branch out your knowledge.

The people who run these are usually user group leaders. Microsoft tries to help out, sometimes with sponsorship money for food, sometimes by donating the space, but this is mostly a community-run event. I haven’t been involved in planning these, but they looks like fairly easy to plan compared to a full conference. If you can get somebody to donate the space, you can use the local user groups as a base for speakers, as well as invite speakers from communities nearby. Because they are community run, it’s relatively easy to get a speaking slot. However, the quality of sessions is quite high. Code camp in New York a few years ago was the first time I started doing public speaking outside of internal presentations at different companies I worked at.

I really enjoy Code Camps. They are nice to learn about things, to interact, to network. You get to see five or six presentations, so even if one or two is not great, it’s still pretty good signal to noise ratio. Also, they are local (although you can always travel to go to ones outside your area), so you don’t have to spend half a day getting there and back.

For a learning-addict like me, Code Camps are a great way to feed the habit…

Resources To Foster Community

User Groups and Code Camps are great community programs. Even though they are run by community, there are a few programs and structures that exist to reinforce them.

Microsoft-Employed Developer Evangelists

I didn’t mention Microsoft employees responsible for partnership because it’s pretty obvious that they exist. What is not obvious is that Microsoft has a title called Developer Evangelist. The job of these people is to encourage and foster Microsoft community, usually in a specific geographic region. Their geographic region can be quite large, with two evangelists covering the NY Metropolitan area, for example – NY, NJ, and CT.

The goal is to evangelize Microsoft technologies and increase adoption of .NET technologies. I believe the best ones view themselves as community’s voice inside Microsoft. I don’t know all they do, but I know they are a great resource to the community groups. In addition to supporting local user groups, they try to reach out to non-Microsoft communities, conduct online seminars for people who don’t like to go to the meetings, work with companies to increase adoption of Microsoft technologies and training, and many other things. Additionally, they have great contacts within the community, and can be counted on to give talks in a pinch.

Developer Evangelists have a tough job – to make it easier for the community to work with Microsoft. Additionally, they work to attract people from outside of Microsoft community, such as people doing Java, PHP. At a minimum, Microsoft would like to make sure they are not very unhappy with Microsoft, maybe just a bit unhappy J.

INETA

Another organization that supports the Microsoft community efforts is INETA – International .NET Association. It’s an organization that serves as an umbrella and a resource for user groups. According to the website, INETA serves 255 user groups.

The INETA Speaker program has a list of speakers, and they make INETA speakers available to user groups. It’s a somewhat exclusive group – to become INETA speaker is not easy. The nice thing about it is that the INETA speakers are good. As a user group you can request an INETA speaker and know that you will get somebody of high quality.

I know that with other user groups and conferences, the quality can vary – this is one way Microsoft user groups make sure the user groups have good quality content. I am not sure if there are member dues for INETA or if it’s a Microsoft-sponsored organization, but I do know it’s a positive force that provides lots of resources to the communities.

The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program

The MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program is probably my favorite program, since I think it’s quite brilliant. Within each product group, a certain number of community members get recognized as MVPs. These are the guys judged to be great at helping increase the community around Microsoft technologies.

What this amounts to is many people who don’t work for Microsoft spending a big chunk of their time evangelizing Microsoft, answering questions, and in other ways promoting Microsoft technologies. In exchange, they get some support from Microsoft, but my guess is that the MVP program costs a fraction of the value it generates for Microsoft. Many MVPs are independent consultants who can use their MVP status as imprimatur for their billable work. Others work for companies. It’s a very symbiotic program – both the MVPs and Microsoft benefit from the relationship tremendously.

One thing to realize is that this is a community program first – it rewards people who are active. This means that while MVPs are usually technically strong, MVP status itself does not really mean that this person is an expert in a technology, just that they are very vocal about helping people in this technology. It’s hard to have one without the other, but it’s possible.

Here is some more information from an article What is an MVP, Anyways:

MVP program is an “award and recognition program.” While a certain amount of technical skill is usually needed to accomplish the tenets of MVP membership, the MVP program is in no way a measuring stick of the technical merits of its members.

The key take-away here is that the MVP program is now agnostic as to the venue (online or offline) that you use to make your community contributions. The result should be a greater amount of diversification in the program’s membership, and, in some respects, it has worked.

The MVP program is designed for people who would make the same community contributions even if the program didn’t exist.

For instance, there are now over 3,100 MVPs in 75 countries worldwide, covering more than 75 technologies in nine languages.

MVPs are great people to reinforce other programs. They generate a lot of knowledge and help through their blogs, and are frequent speakers at community events and conferences. Since they are typically practitioners, they have a unique view of what customers need and how they are actually using the technologies, and some serve as advisors to product managers and Microsoft teams.

How do you become an MVP? It’s an award and recognition program for being active in the community. It started out as a way to reward people active in the online forums. It evolved to now involve speakers, prolific bloggers, writers, and others. There are many ways to become an MVP, and currently there are thousands of MVPs in topics ranging from Outlook to C# to SharePoint. As part of the reward, MVP get MSDN subscription, and are invited to a special annual conference for MVPs, where they get access to the product teams and see what is coming down the line from the company. There are people at Microsoft managing the program, and MVPs can contact them as necessary to get more support from Microsoft as needed.

Regional Director Program

To be honest, this is the program I know the least about. Each region has a person who is a Regional Director (RD), whose role is also to encourage community. There are less than 150 Regional Directors worldwide – you can find yours here. While not employed by Microsoft, I believe they do get some kind of compensation and have certain commitments to Microsoft.

Jonathan Goodyear, one of RDs, writes about the program:

“ RDs are not employed by Microsoft. In fact, we are not compensated for our role as RDs (that’s not completely true … more on that in a bit). The role of an RD is to act as an unbiased third-party evangelist of Microsoft products and services and to work with software developers to ensure successful project engagements. We act as the glue between Microsoft and the developer community”

That same article talks about the difference between Developer Evangelists (DEs) and RDs.

“An important distinction between RDs and DEs is that DEs can be influenced to ride the party line. RDs, on the other hand, can (and often do) voice strong opinions in opposition to things Microsoft is doing that the RDs feel don’t fall in line with the interests of Microsoft developers, end users, and customers. RDs have many media contacts, so their voices are heard loud and clear. In this way, RDs act as a strong advocate for the Microsoft community. “

So in a way, they are representatives of Microsoft who don’t work for Microsoft, and thus has some independence.

Other Programs

In addition to the larger programs above, here are some of the other efforts that I learned about:

• Architecture Day – half a day program for in-depth discussion of technologies.
• Microsoft’s Student Partners program – a program to reach out to Universities – finds students who serve as advocates at educational institutions.
• Installfests – I haven’t been to these, but recently there have been some gatherings around Visual Studio 2008.

Conclusion

One of the best things about the Microsoft Community is that it’s very easy to participate. I was a pretty unknown commodity when I started. Because Code Camps are community-run events, anybody can easily submit a talk topic, and get accepted. As you can see, with dozens of years of fostering it, Microsoft’s community is vibrant and strong. I believe it is one of the company’s biggest assets to remain relevant and increase its reach.

Note: I plan to continue this series by talking about online resources that Microsoft provides, and then will conclude with some suggestions for the Open Source companies on what they can learn from Microsoft’s efforts.

Tags: Microsoft, Community, MVP Program, Code Camp

IASA New York IT Architect Regional Conference – May 22-23, 2008

We have a great lineup of local and global keynote and breakout session presenters lined up for the conference. You would have to pay thousands of dollars plus travel expenses to attend a Gartner or other similar architecture conference elsewhere. We are bringing this conference to New York for a very low price. However due to venue space limitations we can only accommodate 200 attendees. If you are interested in attending we encourage you to register as early as possible.

Early bird registration: (On or before March 31^st):

• $350 for IASA members; $500 for non-IASA members (join for $50 and get the lower rate)

After early bird:

• $450 for IASA members; $600 for non-IASA members (join for $50 and get the lower rate)
• 10% discount will be given for local chapter members. (You can register yourself using discount code: community436.)

The registration link is here.

The ITARC is run by the local chapter of IASA (International Association of Software Architects). IASA is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices. IASA New York Chapter web site here. They hold free monthly meetings focused on various architecture topics.

Unconference for Financial Services Innovators – BarCampMoneyNYC

Also, check out a one-day Unconference called BarCampMoneyNYC for innovators in the finance and financial services industries. It’s a no-cost conference with an admission “price” of presenting a project or conversation topic. You can read more at http://barcamp.org/BarCampMoneyNYC. The event is hosted on Saturday, April 12th at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini in midtown Manhattan.

We met at Sahara – a quiet Turkish restaurant next to where I used to live. A total of five people came to dinner. We had a good cross-section of people who all blogged for different purposes, so it was very interesting to learn from each other. We had a very nice time, and I want to thank all who came for making the evening so interesting. This post will summarize the conversation and insights shared that night.

Here are the people who came, and a little bit about their blogs:

• Eric blogs for largely personal reasons, but without a very clear focus. He writes about technology, becoming a technical manager, book he read, and other topics. Since I am interested in this area, I will attend that his blog is very good.
• Damian is a wine connoisseur. He blogs at redteeth.com. He said he originally started blogging about wine, but over time it evolved about the whole experience around wine.
• Fred is from a family that owns several Italian restaurants in US and Europe. He blogs at Inabbondanza. He also has a restaurant consulting business. His blog serves to reinforce his business. Fred also has other people working with him – a chef blogger in Rome, and another person who acts as a producer. Because he covers a lot of travel destinations, restaurants, and recipes, his older content is valuable, and he is able to charge a small fee for access to his blog’s archives.
• Maria Ogneva just started a blog a few weeks ago. She is an entrepreneur who is starting a company focused on helping real estate investors find each other, and is hoping to have her blog establish her as an authority in the plan.
• I (Jean, a.k.a. NY Web Guy) blog for a combination of personal and professional reasons. It helps me think and clarify ideas. Over time, I am hoping the blog will allow me to contribute to the conversation around technology, entrepreneurship and open source. I feel I have a bit of a focus, although perhaps not strong enough.

Here are some ideas that came up during the discussion:

• Blog Focus. It’s harder to build up traffic if your blog doesn’t have a focus. Your friends may read it, but for a casual visitor there isn’t as much of a payoff to continue to visit you, unless they happen to be interested in the same several areas that you happen to blog about. Around the table, we had three people who had very focused blogs, and two who didn’t.
• Stockpiling posts. Posting regularly is important. Depending on your focus, you also want to be careful about posting too frequently – that can dilute your message. If you have 10 posts per day on a topic, then you are crossing over to a media company, not just a blog. So if an inspiration hits and you have two blogging ideas the same day, write them up, but only post one – save one for later. This is especially good to have if you travel often – you can still have consistency even when you don’t have as much time.
• Publishing Schedule.
  Inabbondanza, the blog focused on Italian culture has different focus area – food, places, culture, sports. They created a publishing schedule so that on a specific day of the week, the readers can expect posts about certain topics. For example – sports on Thursdays. Since they have readers that are really interested in Italian food, but not so much sports, this allows the readers to easily read only the content they care about.
• Color Coding.
  Inabbondanza also color codes their posts to make it easier for readers to find what they like.
• Writing Classes. We discussed whether anybody took writing classes as a way to improve their writing. Nobody at the table has, but Fred had a cautionary tale for us. A chef that he co-blogs with took some classes for writing about food. After that, his writing became worse on some level – since he was trying to apply what he learned, his writing style became way too formal, which started turning off some readers. After some time, he went back to his old, more informal, style.
• Blogging Environment. Some of us shared that they have a special environment they setup for blogging, i.e. have several Firefox tabs open, for translation, reference, etc to have everything on the tips of their fingers.
• Blogging platform. We went around the table and it turned out four of five used WordPress.
• Creating a Community. The Wine and Culture-related bloggers both talked about how they created community, and even did a few offline events with their readers. I am not sure if this is as applicable with other types of blogs, but I am sure if you get big enough, it’s possible. From Eric:
  

  We were talking about Damian’s wine blog, and he observed that it became less about the wine and more about the people and community as time went on. I mentioned Hugh MacLeod and the idea of “Social Objects“, which he summarizes in another post as “The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that are interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.” It’s all about the people, and I think Damian’s experiences bear that out.
  

   

• Sticking it to the Reader. We discussed how to make writing more gripping. Eric brought up the book “Made to Stick” (Eric’s Review), which talks about how to craft a compelling and memorable messages. One technique mentioned in the book is the inverted pyramid that journalists use. Start with your most important idea you want to convey, and then add details in the rest of the article. This way, if the reader stops reading at any point, they will still get most of what you are trying to convey. The book has a lot of other insights as well.
• Optimize for Search. Eric shared his observation that a lot of readers may come through search engines. They can also leave very fast – you need to make it easy for them to stay. Make sure your blog layout is such that they can find other posts that might be interesting to them. Include links to your most popular posts, and random posts. Trying to understand who your users are is very valuable, since you can then think of way to target people in the same demographic.
• Getting Ideas. One of the people suggested that he used free-association brainstorming and mind maps to get ideas about what to write about, and how to cover a topic more completely. This made me think of improvisation classes that I took at UCB. Improv generally can make you more creative, so classes could help improve blogging.

Post Length.

We discussed the issue of a length of posts. I referenced the post by Steve Yegge, who writes essay-like posts. He says that a longer post takes longer for people to digest, and some will be turned off. But over time, a long substantial post will have more influence than several shorter ones. However, without having a lot of traffic already, it’s hard to build up readers this way – most people just won’t bother. I know I started to break up some of my posts into series format, the way Paul Mark Andresen does. You also don’t want your posts to be too short. Eric later sent out some good links to Jakob Nielsen’s post on content strategy, where he examines the issue of content length. Here is another great post by Nielsen where he suggests that if you are a world-class expert, you should write articles.

From Eric’s email:

He suggests that different lengths are appropriate for different readers – “On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.”

Personally, I don’t seem to write short posts – most of them are on the longer side. I think that would definitely be a good strategy if I was more famous. This is an issue I am very interested in when it comes to my blog, so I’ll be thinking and reading more about it.

How to Increase Traffic:

Great focus on a specific topic will attract people interested in that area.

• In blogosphere, linking and comments are a form of social currency. People see where their traffic comes from, so the more you link to others, the more they will link to you. Providing a link to a relevant blog post you did when you comment is also a good way to get some readers.
• Monitor the current memes in your area (i.e. Techmeme.com), and write posts on the current memes. Since a lot of people are talking about this topic, you are likely to be a beneficiary of some of the traffic.
• Find blogs related to your focus that syndicate content, and sing up. For example, I syndicate my blog on NextNY blog, and my company’s blog. When I write relevant posts, I tag them appropriately and they show up on there. This increases the reach of your ideas. Over time, if you have good and relevant content, people will want to subscribe to you directly.
• InAbondanza contacted local meetups in the related area – meetups of Italian expatriates or ones focuses on Italian Culture. Since the meetups didn’t have a voice, the blog became a good spot for the community to frequent, and many people from the groups subscribed.
• Syndicate your blog. Adding your blog to other, more popular sites, is one way to increase the reach of your ideas. Also, as time goes on, people will notice that you (hopefully) have something interesting to say, and will subscribe to your blog directly.
• Pre-writing and timing posts to be posted when a certain events occur. For example, Hank Williams wrote an post about the Chandler project since he knows that space very well. He posted it around the time that there was some news related to the project, which meant that people were looking for information about it. Another popular blogger found it, linked to it, and thus he got pretty good traffic from it.
• You need to make it easy for people to stay with your blog – i.e. introduce who you are, etc.

Somebody asked a question about if there are any good books on blogging. Nobody really knew, except for a short book on blogging etiquette called Blogging (Quamut) – it was suggested as a good short primer (online version here).

Private Blogs. We talked about entrepreneurs using blogs to promote their companies, to announce their plans, and generally to make their companies more approachable. This is what Maria is trying to do at meetmojo.com. It was interesting to find out that two of the guys who are also starting companies keep internal blogs. This allows them to communicate with their employees and investors. Sort of like status report for investors.

More Resources:

• Eric wrote a post on “What I know about blogging” last summer at when a colleague was thinking about starting.
• Pro Blogger – lots of good content on becoming a better blogging -
• A list of resources (from 2006) on getting started with blogging from ProBlogger.

Guy Kawasaki’s Article on Blogging.