1.
Nitobi/PhoneGap
A serious look at serious business.

2.
coincidence?

3.
a meme is born

4.
follow along...
@andrecharland
@brianleroux
@nitobi
@phonegap

5.
2007-ish
Nitobi moving from products to services.

6.
two choices
specialization or agnosticism

7.
specialize
Know one thing well.

8.
agnostic
‣ generalized devs (tricky to do)
‣ hire specialists (expensive to do)

9.
pragmatic
Be of the web.

10.
detractors of web tech
are an endangered species
Tanner Glass leaves them be.

11.
web tech stack
• the new frontline for browser wars is js
engine execution
• this leading to server impls like NodeJS
• also seeing huge grfx perf improvements
for things like WebGL

12.
Ruby on Rails?

13.
how we do
• billable; hourly --- NO FIXED BIDS EVAR
• track our time to the minute
• estimates are in the spirit of literal meaning
of the word
• iterate; weekly or daily builds

14.
crucial factors
• revision control
• unit tests
• issue tracking
• automated daily/weekly builds

15.
non technical factors
• UX and IxD own the product
• Ship a min viable product
• YAGNI

16.
Ship EARLY
• if a client wants it in a month see what can
be launched in two weeks
• long hours are detrimental to success: CUT
SCOPE

17.
Our office is mobile
• basecamp to keep clients honest
• git and github for issues, rcs, collab
• harvest/coopapp for time tracking
• google docs for other artifacts

18.
we’ll throw out all those tools if a
client has an existing system in place

19.
key to agnosticism
Stay on top of new tech. Listen to the devs.

20.
2008
mobile web trending

21.
time to build our
acumen
• @davejohnson started hacking his
BlackBerry
• @infil00p ordered himeself a G1
• rest of us coveted our man jewellery
iPhones

22.
Aug 7, 2008
http://blogs.nitobi.com/brock/2008/08/07/unofficial-announcement-of-phonegap/

23.
byproduct simple rules
1. find a tough problem
2. *attempting* to solve it is more than
anyone else is doing
3. you have just created value
4. sometimes you can turn value into money

24.
new problems
• now our business is 75% services
• those services were all over the map but
none where in mobile

25.
continued to build the
story and acumen
• 20% time hacking
• related passion projects
• informed our clients of our mobile war
stories

26.
evolution
• phonegap/android came a month later
• phonegap/blackberry a month after that
• we now support:
• ios, android, bb, symbian, webos, bada
• soon: meego, wp7

27.
solve problem when
you have them.
• git and github is fantastic. really you should
be using it. (until you shouldn’t)
• added a wiki when we needed docs
• added a mailing list when we needed to
support ppl using the software
• formal docs came last year

28.
licensing
• MIT/BSD
• Apache

29.
growing up
• taking outside contributers
• having a formal release schedule
• planning our future battles

30.
two types of tech problems

31.
• science
• big ball of mud

32.
science
• distributed map/reduce
• mapping the human genome
• putting a gyroscope into orbit in one shot
on a multibillion dollar budget

33.
big ball of mud
• mvc framework for language X
• unit test frameworks for language X
• dom library
• any impedance mismatch, really

34.
take away
• tech deprecates: you do not have to
• foster learning
• use devs wisely; ask them about passion
projects

35.
YOUR tech deprecates
• maintenance is not a chore
• grand rewrites are paths to failure
• you need advocates that are customers

36.
marketing
• not free but damn cheap
• speak at confs
• give away as much IP as possible
• identify byproducts of value and champion

37.
marketing cont..
• blogs last forever: urls
• tweets connect ppl
• 3 min shitty screencast > polished docs

38.
dev happyness
• devs create value writing code
• do everything you can to maximize that time
inc 20% time
• NO OVERTIME.
• free them of noise, meetings, etc
• give them the best tools, confs, etc
• team w/ a rad UX / IxD person

39.
dev happyness 2
• don’t hire ‘rockstars’: create them
• foster DISPASSIONATE devs
• critical thinking > marketing dept zealotry
• eradicate attachment to anything: ALL
TECH DEPRECATES
• have fun with it.

40.
new direction
• mullet business model
• services that feed products that create
services

41.
Questions? Code? Hockey time nao?