Toby Boudreaux's Barbarian Blog

First O'Reilly InsideRIA Blog Post

Toby Boudreaux — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:55:43 -0400

Doing some writing for O’Reilly. My first post is on the rad SproutCore framework.

Now go submit some patches to their SCM to get TableView support finished!

Pfeffer's Axe

Toby Boudreaux — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:29:55 -0400

Twitter-Free Fridays Are Stupid

Toby Boudreaux — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:34:59 -0400

I read an explanation of “Twitter-Free Friday” on Raster Web this morning, and it inspired in me a kind of knee-jerk vitriol usually reserved for conservative bloggers.

Twitter is a monopoly. Just like Microsoft was and Google is. And any time you rely on one single entity for something, that’s bad news. Even worse news if it’s something you need or really want, because at some point, after you are hooked, they will screw it up, and you’ll have no alternative.

With the original Microsoft-Free Friday by Dave Winer, the goal was to punish Microsoft for their abuse of their power in one segment (OS penetration and OEM channels) inside another segment (browser penetration). This was a trust issue, and a monopoly issue. Microsoft, by leveraging the walled gardens of their operating system made it practically impossible for competition to exist. The DOJ took note.

The person who dreamt up “Twitter-Free Fridays” seems to have a definition for “monopoly” that is far looser than that of the DOJ. My guess is that they found a palatable one-liner in a dictionary and assumed they were sufficiently armed to make legal judgments.

Being at the top of an emerging market segment does not constitute a monopoly. Unfair practices, abuses of that dominance to limit fair access to resources and outlets – those are monopolistic. If Twitter struck a deal with Mozilla that blacklisted other microblogging services, we’d have something to talk about. Opening APIs freely and allowing supplemental markets to emerge hardly seems consistent with railroad barons.

Twitter isn’t a monopoly. There are no trust issues. They are, by some metrics, the top dog in microblogging, but many competitors exist and thrive in an equal opportunity environment.

Are we going to start casually redefining unfair advantage in the scope of “social” applications as any user base larger than an arbitrary number?

Is the misunderstanding of monopolistic practice going to lead to an organized backlash against any entrepreneurial start up lasting beyond their first round of funding? Will there be exceptions for those who adopt the “blessed” techno-despotism implied by the half-baked Data Portability “movement” or its half dozen sibling groups?

The reason trusts are illegal, that monopolistic abuse is illegal, is that it stifles markets and hurts consumers. Beating up on the current leader because they don’t use a library or microformat or federated architecture you like – or because they’re popular – leads to the same end result.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I am all for the market crushing a business if the business deserves it. And I believe it’s up to the market to decide who deserves what.

Still, rather than negative whiny bullshit, if the market demands a federated microblogging system, I’d rather see AFFIRMATIVE SUPPORT for the competition instead of NEGATIVE DAMNATION of perfectly honest, viable, useful services. Pimp Identi.ca all you want! Sing its praises. But do it without acting like a baby and lobbing very powerful words (that you don’t understand) around.

The type of misapplied armchair thought leadership embodied in the “Twitter-Free Friday” effort is the type of thing that spreads from one nobody blog to the next until there’s a monopolization of communication: the noise having a clear and present advantage over signal, stifling meaningful discussion entirely.

I hereby claim Mondays as “Blogwhore Chicken Little Idiot Free.”

On Tuesdays, we can talk about carving out a market segment for federated microblogging systems. Tuesdays will be for productivity, meaning, value.

See you next week.

Hi. I'm TobyJoe.

Toby Boudreaux — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:27:30 -0400

Rick, our precious and beloved COO, has insisted that I post to the company blog.

I’m not at all opposed to that, but have a hard time finding the line between my voice and that of the company. After all, being CTO, everything I do reflects on the shop in some way (sorry, dudes!)

Things like showing up on time, going to bed by 10pm, having a baby, being married… All of this baggage really drags the reputation of this place down. I’m sure we’ve lost business due to my lack of cirrhosis or the fact that I’ve never tried a cigarette.

Hi. I’m TobyJoe, and I’m boring.

I posted on my own pathetic blog about my failings as a geek.

This post will serve as both an introduction (again – HELLO!) and a follow-up to my serialized biography and self-crit.

Geographical Biographical

I’m from Georgia. I totally hate Georgia. That’s why I don’t currently live in Georgia.
But, as with all rules, there’s an exception. I really like Athens. I spent many years there and still have lots of friends and contacts in that area. Aside from the time I was involved in a ~20 person line cook vs fratboy brawl and got my face smashed in by a guy in a ballcap, or the time two crackheads broke into my apartment and held my roommates and I at gunpoint (until one roommate – the son of a WWF wrestler – snatched the gun away and chased them outside), my memories of Athens are AWESOME.

I really dig college towns. Clean air, relatively smart and cultured folks, big houses, cheap everything, and almost zero stress… Ah, sweet college towns.

My wife is from State College, PA (JoePa!) and I adore the place. It’s got everything: the Amish, a bagel store, and some mountains. There’s a Quaker school for my son. There are even mobile meth labs!

Conflict of Interest

My big personal conflict here at The Barbarian Group is between my small/college town lust and my trendy almost-passion for agile development.

I’ve become quite the advocate of certain agile development methodologies over the past two years. One thing agile prefers is colocation of teams in order to foster better communication. It makes sense. That magical moment of standing over someone’s shoulder, helping them solve a bug or tweak a design makes a lot of the shitty moments (late nights, framework design flaws, Web services) more tolerable.

Here at TBG, we work in a way that only offers partial colocation. We split all projects across all of our offices as a way to ensure whole-company influence. We don’t have an “A Team” and a “B Team” and so on. We have one massive, terribly awesome team of folks who are cross-functional despite their classical titles (which some of our more stodgy clients demand). Every project here is touched or thought about or spoken of by nearly every person at some point in its life cycle.

It works really, really well. We produce amazing work. Nobody reading this can compete with us. We’re retarded good.

The only downside is that, occasionally, implementation tasks can feel a bit isolated. Chandler out in LA can’t easily ask me to take a peek at something without going through a whole SVN branch-commit-checkout process. It kinda kills some of those magic moments.

It’s a minor gripe. It’s an aesthetic gripe, at core. I like these folks, and like to collaborate in the flesh. For one, that sounds really filthy (YAY!). Also, online, I come off as a real dick. In person, I’m super cuddly and lovable. Sexy, even.

So, where’s my conflict, exactly?

The gist is this: I frequently push towards stronger colocation, despite clear proof that our current methods work very well. At the same time, I long to buy a farmhouse with a T1 and work remotely year-round.

I’m thinking I should shut up about colocation and just move to the country. At least then my boring lifestyle of child-rearing, book writing, team building, job selling, coding, cooking and going to bed early will be a novelty.

Maybe I’ll buy a huge Victorian and make it into a Barbarian Bed and Breakfast. I can fly project teams out and put them up in four-poster beds and cook them Berkshire bacon and eggs and make them work their asses off and choke on the clean air.

Barbarian Boalsburg, anyone?