June 19, 2013

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Imagine No Software Releases, It’s Easy If You Try [song]

March 27, 2012

imagine no software releases
it’s easy if you try
no waiting on gatekeepers
above us only sky

imagine all the software going live today
imagine there’s no limit
it isn’t hard to do
nothing to delay or wait for
and no pre-planning too

imagine all the software going live today
you may say i’m a dreamer, but i’m not the only one
embracing continuous software concepts
with software promoted live at once

imagine no barriers
i wonder if you can
no need to wait for QA
promoting code to live

imagine all the software going live today
you may say
i’m a dreamer, but i’m not the only one
embracing continuous software concepts
with software promoted live all day


Case Study of Why Users Banding Together is so Lucrative

March 25, 2012

Included on my to-do list this weekend is figuring out iDev Affiliate for a beloved client.

While banging my head against the wall with this thing, I realized here is a classic reason why us consultants and site owners banding together is so darn lucrative.

Way back when, my client wanted Virtuemart to track affiliates. Since VM does not have this feature, we needed a program, and chose iDev. When someone buys in VM, the thank you page throws off a URL to iDev, which then inserts a record into the idevaff_sales table.

First of all, my client is paying $29.99USD per month for the hosting, which is just a reseller account. You can get the Hostgator “Business” hosting with SSL for $15USD/month. Or, just use your current Hostgator account, add-on a new domain, spend $50/year for SSL, and you have $250 left over. Now, this is not insignificant, you’ll see!

iDev is not open source. Nothing I did touched iDev. Instead, I used external PHP with CRON to modify the “payment” field in the “idevaff_sale” table. That is, I over-wrote the iDev commission calculations with my custom calculations.

By the time we mess around on the margins of this program, we could have put that energy into a real commission program of our own. How many hours did it take me to figure out iDev, and how to run my own “API” script against the database? Lots. And, now, how much time have I spent investigating and testing a problem. The problem is the lack of usability of my handiwork, because there are no admin for what I did.

I spend 10 hours in total messing around, and instead we could have started our own affilate program. The time saved by not using someone else’s reseller account, plus what I bill, plus what a few other Club Commerce Members chip in, and voila, we have $2,000.

There are open source affiliate solutions out there, so we can modify what’s there, or just absorb ideas. It would be very interesting to attach the payout features with the payment step in checkout — en route to making an ecomm platform of sorts, rather than each individual thing have all the elements of checkout. Anyways, the point is that there are open source affiliate software that can potentially save us time/money building our own custom affilate LaSalleMart solutions.

Attaching this affilate solution to our Continuous Development process means we don’t have to build all features all at once. As new features are in demand, we build those. Not for free, new features need paid programmers. But, you got the basics and that provided RoI. Now, new incremental features bring incremental revenue.

But the thing that I am really trying to get across is that “upstream” modifications are brutally expensive. For what we spend on post-installation feature building, we could build our own thing from scratch, bring the bulk of development back “downstream”, have a bunch of people share the cost of development, and make more money.

For all the effort we are lavishing on an itty bitty piece of the affiliate software, we could have asked a bunch of people needing affiliate software to chip in top-up money and built a more powerful, more friendly, more relevant affiliate features. So there!


Toronto Joomla Users Group Meet-up, March 2012

March 20, 2012

Hello Faisal!

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who attended this evening’s Toronto Joomla Users Group meet-up at Yonge/Sheppard.

Eight of us were there, from Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Toronto West, Guelph, Whitby, and downtown. Quite a distance spanned.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but tonight was one of the most satisfying JUGT experiences I’ve had. Maybe it was the summer like weather, I don’t know.

I had 4 distinct meetings tonight spanning 5-1/2 hours. Zach came down early and we huddled about LaSalleMart. Then a group of us talked about the state of Joomla ecommerce with an overview of the most popular extensions. Then Joe & I caught up, while taking me on a tour of the South Chicago Joomla User Group ACL presentation, with the Black Hawks/Canucks playing on the big screen — seemed symbolic! Then, some of us stuck around for the “after-meeting” talking about the Joomla project, JAB2012, and other tidbits. Lots of really good information.

For those who use Joomla in Toronto, #JUGT is a valuable connection to Joomla. Tonight I heard valuable insight into proposed changes to Joomla 3.0 that is an interesting heads up. Now I have context when I see something on twitter or happen upon an article at Joomla.org.

I was so involved in discussions that I forgot to take pictures when everyone was there. I took a pics during the “after-meeting”, just so I wouldn’t walk out empty handed.

See you next month!


Jenkins Presentation and New Book

March 15, 2012

Jenkins CI Server

Zach sent me the URL to a Jenkins presentation during our 2-1/2 hour private Hangout. I sent him the URL to a new book I found on Amazon called Integrating PHP Projects with Jenkins.

The presentation is called “Continuous Integration using Jenkins“.

This pdf is also on my site (9Mb), as is the pdf of “The Definitive Guide to Jenkins“.

Slide 13 took me by surprise by using the word “Profit!”. Slid that in there, eh! Read the slides after this one. This presentation is not for you, the site owner and consultant. It’s for other programmers! This is where the value is, and it’s not expected that non-technical people will exploit this technology because it’s just too technical. What I notice is this presentation is a sell job to get programmers to use CI.

At some point, CI will be mainstream. We’re not there yet, but we are on our way. We aren’t waiting for CI to be mainstream, we are all over this thing now.

Using CI means doing Joomla differently. We’re blazing this trail. It’s called Leadership!

The book’s author is described as:

The computer scientist (Diplom-Informatiker) is a co-founder of thePHP.cc and a pioneer in the field of quality assurance in PHP projects. His testing framework, PHPUnit, is a de facto standard.

I can’t get over the comments!

It’s unfortunate, however, that the book is so brief, because much more detail could’ve been provided about the way the tools are best used, especially the meaning of the different metrics included in the various static code analysis tools.

I admit freely that I get frustrated many times by the needless fluff to tech books that appears to be added to books for additional page count. This book has been stripped of almost all fluff, and there needs to be some fluff to provide readers with padded surface to guide them through new information. Readers may benefit from reading the conclusion first.

Rushing a book to market to stake first claim to technical bona fides to bolster a consulting business? Maybe — I can be rather cynical.

To me, this is a nascent area that is growing: CI and PHP. Soon to be CI and Joomla. There is no book on this. We will write this book ourselves. What is different is that our point-of-view is site-owners, and not extension purveyors.

As I said in my “Late Night Thoughts on LaSalleMart” post (with pic of Dustin Hoffman driving on the Golden Gate Bridge):

Surveying the dev@Cloud Jenkins service, I asked myself “What the hell am I doing?”. I’ve had no occassion to get into this stuff ’til now, so what am I doing here? Can this really be the Moneyball of Joomla ecommerce?

Ladies and gentlemen, it really is the Moneyball of Joomla ecommerce. This is where the techies see real value. This is techie stuff created by techies for techies for the express purpose of creating value in the development process. It’s to make things easier, to avoid doing repetitive tasks, to reduce bugs, to increase the quality of the code, to deploy code.

The thing is, it’s a techie thing. The last thing this part of the techie world expects is “users”. But that’s exactly what we are doing. We, site owners and consultants, are driving our Alfa Romeo’s across that great bridge into the golden roadway to RoI. They are not expecting us there, where the shock on the faces of the techies will be clear on their faces. The last thing they expect here are users from the wrong side of the bridge usurping the very technology that creates immense value for their software development process.

Remember who told you about this, before it was fashionable!