Re: Finding WO people for startups
Re: Finding WO people for startups
- Subject: Re: Finding WO people for startups
- From: Dan Beatty <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:40:43 -0700
- Thread-topic: Finding WO people for startups
Greetings Pascal and Philippe,
You each make excellent points. So far we have done some pretty effective
things despite our small numbers. One, the screen casts tend to be
effective in show new comers the "how-to" of WO without seeming like a
lecture.
While it would be nice to have training near the students, some training is
better than none. The cost of these things is a pain in the neck. It is
hard to make a profit from these things. However, if the capabilities that
come with WO vanishes from the face of the earth, then we have even worst
trouble.
I think that Paul said one enlightening point about WO best in one of his
talks. Most companies that sell these other technologies sell time. The
time of the system administrators. The time of the information assurance
personnel to verify quality. The time of the maintainence developers
necessary to keep newer versions of the software flowing. To some this is
an example of making a mole hill product. If the project is lucky, it grows
to gather enough funding to pay for all of the overhead. Those of you who
have run WO companies have had efficient technologies that have allowed you
to provide a better quality product to your customers. Better quality
merits profit that you can use. Furthermore, the success of WO garners
credibility of products that do what they say they will do for a price that
is very close to its actual value.
To match WO, the low quality products will cut corners and vent fumes of
poison stories. At least Rails and Python have some frameworks based on
good science (just like WO). Others like PHP, occationally have developers
who will impose such discipline only to cut the effort short when they have
to get a product out.
I have found that it is cheaper for me to develop a prototype with
technologies like Direct To Web and train a student to learn WO than it is
to try and bang a product out in PHP. Some of my students came from the
PHP world. They confessed that the products we built could not be done PHP
even if they had 10 times the effort or longitivty to do it. That is the
value of WO. That is the value WOWODC as material to train new comers.
This is the value of the WO Community.
Thank you,
Daniel Beatty
On 9/25/11 6:51 AM, "Philippe Rabier" <email@hidden> wrote:
> Agree with Pascal.
>
> And think about all interesting good quality framework available everywhere
> (apache projects, quartz scheduler, Jboss community projects and of course
> wonder).
>
> If I dare, I would say that if your project entices enough, it should be not
> too difficult to hire java developers. The good point, if they don't know WO,
> they bring with them other skills you maybe don't have. That was the case for
> me.
>
> About RoR, we made a big development with this technology for a one of our
> client but we didn't go further. There are beautifull things (unit testing,
> deployment, migration) but we saw also many crap projects developed quickly.
> And ruby is a very nice language but not so easy to understand quickly.
>
> And I read that rails 3.x is very different from rails 2.x. So would you start
> a new project with rails 2 because there are more developers? No easy answer.
>
> Note there are also big discussions in the rails community:
> http://blog.stevecoast.com/what-the-hell-is-happening-to-Rails
>
> Regarding your last question, I don't have good answers because for all the
> reasons I gave you, I start new projects with Wonder. But we start to look at
> node.js because it's a very promising technology IMHO.
>
> Philippe
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 25 sept. 2011, at 13:36, Pascal Robert <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>> One thing that I like a lot with Java (including WO) is that deployment on
>> multiple platforms is much easier that other environments. This is especially
>> true if you are selling products that customers will install it themselves.
>> Try to install a tool like CalendarServer (Python-based) on CentOS and see
>> how much pain it is. Windows support for node.js was added in... July 2011,
>> and it's declared "beta" quality.
>>
>> And Java = less breaking APIs. It's incredible the number of times of moving
>> from, say Python 2.4 to 2.5, will break APIs. Again, Java people try to avoid
>> that. And Java also have a lot of quality libraries. Search for MySQL for
>> node.js, at least 5 "drivers" exist. So that means you will probably have to
>> try the 5 of them to see which one works best.
>>
>> Java and WO are not perfect, but I prefer something stable than API and
>> deployment problems.
>>
>>> Hi Philippe,
>>>
>>> thanks for your answer, interesting points.
>>>
>>> It would be only one WO developer, joined by a Front-end developer and a
>>> third developer yet to be hired.
>>>
>>> It's easy to find Java developers, the question is how many of them actually
>>> want to learn WebObjects. I'm the CTO in a small company and this is
>>> actually a big difficulty when hiring people. Some are interested, most are
>>> not.
>>>
>>> My friend has basic knowledge in Rails and some other technologies. I think
>>> he won't start until december so he could manage to get up to speed until
>>> then. Of curse it's not the same level as his current knowledge of WO.
>>> The main argument in favor of Rails would be that it's quite easy to find
>>> competent people who already know the framework.
>>>
>>> I'll also let him know to look into Node.js. Do you have hands-on
>>> experience, is it mature enough? Maybe I should also suggest using Clojure
>>> and ClojureScript, but it would be even harder to find people for that :)
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> - Marius
>>>
>>>
>>> On 25.09.2011, at 12:06, Philippe Rabier wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Marius,
>>>>
>>>> I have several developers who were new at WO in 2 different companies. The
>>>> main point is that they knew java.
>>>>
>>>> All the problem talked by Pascal and other regarding documentation for
>>>> example are important for a new developer that can not be trained/coached
>>>> by another one. But that's not your case. For example, we hired a 10 years
>>>> java skilled developer who used jdbc at low level (writing SQL code by
>>>> hand) in their previous companies. Believe me that he found WO "magical".
>>>> He was able to write code in less than a month. And i saw several other
>>>> developers like him.
>>>>
>>>> We have also a student for 6 month who comes from University where he
>>>> learnt a lot of java and it was a matter of weeks.
>>>>
>>>> If you are 2 WO developers, I would recommend you start alone because you
>>>> will go faster (hiring people, training takes time). If you need 10
>>>> developers, it's not a lean startup ;-)
>>>>
>>>> When you have existing code (clean and with some pieces of java doc), it
>>>> will help you to include new developers because it will be easy for you to
>>>> explain, you will have include your own patterns,
>>>>
>>>> About RoR or other stuffs like PHP, if you don't know them, don't use them.
>>>> You can't be fast and learn something new at the same time. If you know
>>>> only COBOL, use COBOL. But if you want to consider something new, look at
>>>> node.js. For me, and I'm not alone to think that: using the sane language
>>>> on the client and server side is a key factor in productivity and all the
>>>> team speak the same language.
>>>>
>>>> Philippe
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On 24 sept. 2011, at 20:38, Marius Soutier <email@hidden>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi there,
>>>>>
>>>>> I know this a difficult and opinionated topic, but I have been asked by a
>>>>> friend what technology to choose for a Lean Startup (= 3 months until the
>>>>> first minimum viable product). While he and I know WebObjects quite well,
>>>>> I think it's safe to say there are only few people here in Germany who
>>>>> know it at all. I'm personally convinced (and have seen this affirmed by
>>>>> the two WOWODC talks about Lean Startup and Fluffy Bunny, excellent talks
>>>>> by the way) that WO itself is a great technology to get things up and
>>>>> running very fast. However, what if the business grows and he needs to
>>>>> hire more people?
>>>>>
>>>>> My first question is - do you easily find skilled people who are willing
>>>>> to learn WebObjects? What's your experience on this?
>>>>>
>>>>> And the second question would be - how long does it take them to be
>>>>> productive, i.e. write working code without much help. I'm assuming here
>>>>> the person knows Java quite well and is eager to learn new stuff.
>>>>>
>>>>> The alternative would be Ruby on Rails, which seems quite popular in
>>>>> startups nowadays.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your insight!
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> - Marius
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
>>>>> Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
>>>>> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>>>>>
>>>>> This email sent to email@hidden
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
>>> Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
>>> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>>>
>>> This email sent to email@hidden
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
> Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>
> This email sent to email@hidden
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden