Organic Programming

7 Perspectives about “Agility” from: decent citizen,negative citizen,top management,Scrum Master,team work lover,specialist and God:

Today I got an email from somebody that found our site selling obfusc (a tool, php obfuscator) and it is interested in using it. The mail:

Dear abss ,

hope my words reach your heart.

<name>

I like his message (how you could not:D) it tells us that we have a good product and some people are loving it.  As we prepare to release a new product, SensErp I would like to see your impression about this email (comments or by email)!

Yeap,HowToWeb  was usefull and gave me time for thinking about new ideas  regarding our strategy for the near future. Yes,Axiologic  is a small software technology company and we are bit  too geeky. We love to build, innovate  things and we are not that passionated about selling…  But we can be disruptive with our technology. I bet on this factor.  Our presentation  was talking about MVC and was useful only for programmers. My fault For angels and VCs it was too geeky and wired . We all live in our own perception tunnel,what can we do.  In the same way I have problems hiring the right sales people (because I don’t like their style,life strategy) , I expect that business only minded angels and VCs will have a hard time seeing those technological elephants in the room that could ruin tomorrow their loved investments.  Not necessarily coming from us,of course,don’t understand me wrong,we still could be too geeky and idealists  :)

I’ve realized also that what I like are: small businesses. Trying to conquest the galaxy is sick and dangerous for all.  Not the money are important but how we use those money for making people happier.  It’s sad that many people can’t  see this and consume large amounts of energy on silly things like conquering the galaxy instead of doing something good for others and to enjoy the good things coming back in their life. It is a life strategy and I will not change it. The alternative is too stupid.

In the end the survivors are not necessarily those that temporarily  get control over others life but those that learn how to build powerful, innovative and healthy societies. Too bad that our life is so short and those with slower understanding rates will never understand anything else except what they perceive within their own perception tunnels..

And a conclusion: My real rock stars at @howtoweb: @markran Mark Randall (Adobe) and @codepo8 Christian Heilmann (Yahoo) . Nice people,great talks!

http://www.senserp.com/htw/htw2.pdf

For HowToWeb participants: Come at our stand for a demo and discussions!

Our presentation qualified Axiologic as a finalist of HowToWeb  Startup Challenge competition!

Our presentation (Thank you Bogdan!)

I never said this clearly until now: Quark is a new generation MVC framework for RIA. Yeap.. We are not competing with Rails like frameworks (and we don’t copy them) because our point of view is that RIA is the future for web based applications. Generating html code on servers is ugly,messy and stinks (uhhh )!
We are currently using Adobe’s Flash (because Flex is mature enough to build on top of it) but one day somebody should port our MVC on JavaScript or even better, should implement Quark Schema support directly in the browsers. If we succeed to promote our framework, I expect that in 5 years, Quark Schema language will be a web standard. If we fail,I think that somebody else will rediscover later what we are doing: there is just no other way!

Because in Quark applications, the domain knowledge is strictly separated from the framework, I can see coming a day when Quark like frameworks will get support for many languages (on the server side) and that will provide a solution to the dreams of MDA (without using UML of course).
UML is probably too abstract and not that friendly for traditional developers but the idea of building applications around of a domain model and to be able to easily port an application from .net to Java or to a new technology that will appear in 5 years, has real value.
With this approach, an investment that a company is doing in software will preserve his value many years.

We bet on promoting SensErp as a RAD tool to create working DESIGNS and PROTOTYPES for Enterprise Applications but when developers will taste its power, they will adopt Quark as their favorite programming framework!

Someone once said that successful people  put the same amount of effort on promoting their work as on work itself. We are not yet there but even so… these days we are changing the design for our start-up site and creating an early registration form on  sensErp’s  domain ( soon here : the best enterprise software platform: senserp.com!)

From those pages, I have a summary of what SensErp should mean :

“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.” Edsger Dijkstra

We had a discussion today in a meeting and we had an strong insight: we don’t try to create/sell just another RAD framework but we are trying to sell: an environment that will enforce code discipline,an architecture that respects the experience of the industry (like MDA), best practices.

Really! We even decided to sacrifice from the programmer’s immediate convenience in order to deliver what we promise: reduced  maintenance costs for the final applications. That could annoy some users if we fail to communicate what we are really selling: DISCIPLINE in PROGRAMMING with  MVC,  good practices and environment that will inhibit programmers  to do clever tricks. Only at the end we should say that we sell  a simpler programming framework! Sure, we are also targeting Excel users (at least the most sophisticated ones and only for simple things like CRUDs,simple forms) but it just happens that doing a “visual editor for MVC” led us near possible alternatives to spreadsheets space of tools. It is risky,very risky for a business to educate his customers but we are trying our best to do it in a easy and rewarding way.

Yes, a good education is required to appreciate elegance but usually the most elegant solution is the one that is more simple and efficient (almost by definition of the elegance) and we are thriving to achieve just that!

By best practices we mean things like:

• loose object coupling [1]
• real MVC architecture (and as simple as possible)
• MDA
• don’t mix many technologies and APIs in the same place (or like mixing view with controller as in many pseudo MVC frameworks)
• Don’t re-invent the wheel [2] (we have reinvented it for you )
• Keep things as simple as possible but not simpler. [2]
• Learn from others mistakes, not your own. [2]
• Begin with an end in mind [2]
• If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. [2]
• others…[]

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_coupling
[2] http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvb/thread/78f6a9ba-05eb-45b7-88d5-8bcfcf0643cc

Reading this post: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2006/07/but-martin-enterprise-software-is.html I’ve remembered that basically  I have the same beliefs. Doing a framework for enterprise software is not boring at all. Of course we all know that. Doing one to be successful is hard. I’m trying for the 3th time to create a real maintenance cost killer framework for Enterprise software and finally I’m happy with the results (Quark 2.0 is just awesome!!!)

It is almost common sense that a business idea should be a little boring in order to be a good businesses idea (and i’m a little afraid that the work for the framework was  not boring enough ).

Our business strategy:

• create a technology to reduce creation/maintenance costs for enterprise software (with real programmers in mind,even if we are oriented even towards beginners or more business oriented people). Yes, you have Spring,Rails that are OK for programmers with medium experience but we can do much more for “Excel programmers”  but also for programmers with various skills and interests!
• looking for a way to replace Excel :we are not creating a spreadsheet clone but we want a tool with a similar learning curve as Excel for nontechnical users
• flood the market with good quality software for SMBs (open source and commercial)

Given that, I don’t think Enterprise Software is boring for everybody (is boring only for some hackers) . There are enough people (actually many many people) that have business orientation and skills to use modern programming tools for the creation of new, beautiful and useful software for companies without even asking themselves if it is boring or not.

We are preparing a presentation for how-to-web startup contest  http://www.how-to-web.net/startup-challenge/

Wish us good luck!