Lettre ouverte envoyée à Philippe Duval, président et directeur général de la SAQ, au sujet de leur application iPhone.

Cher Philippe,

Je dois vous faire part d’une constatations troublante et ma foi inacceptable: l’application iPhone de la SAQ n’est simplement pas à la hauteur de ce que l’on s’attend de l’institution chouchou des Québécois.

Ne vous y trompez pas, les fonctionnalités de recherche sont excellentes. En fait, la performance de votre recherche par code barre éclipse totalement celle de l’application que j’utilisais jusqu’à maintenant. La possibilité de géo-localiser la succursale la plus proche ayant un certain produit en inventaire est un petit bijou.

Mais c’est à peu près tout.

Où sont les fonctionnalités sociales de l’application ?

Pourquoi ne pas me permettre de partager ma liste de favoris avec mes amis et de consulter la leur ?

Ou de simplement partager mes trouvailles sur Facebook ou Twitter ?

Pour ce qui est de la recherche de succursales, vous êtes complètement passés à côté d’un cas majeur d’utilisation qui se résume à cette question: “Samedi soir, 18h20, où est la succursale ouverte la plus proche ?” À quoi bon me présenter les 5 succursales environnantes si elles sont fermées ? À tout le moins offrez-moi la possibilité de consulter leur horaire.

Vu la popularité sans cesse grandissante des bons vins au Québec, vous aviez la possibilité de créer l’application la plus populaire et la plus aimée à ce jour dans la belle province. Et vous avez échoué. Ne vous fiez pas aux données de téléchargement pour me contredire, venez prendre le pouls des 25-45 qui l’utilisent.

Mais tout n’est pas perdu. Tout développeur de produits rêve de travailler sur une application pouvant avoir autant d’impact. Je vous offre de mettre mes 12 années d’expérience en développement de produits, ainsi que celles d’un designer de renom et de 2 développeurs iPhone à votre service pour pourvoir les Québécois d’une application à la hauteur de leurs attentes.

Vu votre budget probablement dilapidé par une agence de pub, tout ce que l’on demande comme salaire est la constitution d’une généreuse cave a vins.

J’ai réservé mon mercredi matin pour continuer cette discussion avec vous. Laissez moi savoir à quel numéro je peux vous rejoindre.

Merci et bonne soirée,

 

Phil Gauvin

I recently hired a promising school dropout. He goes by the nomulous moniker on the web and as Fletcher Tomalty everywhere else. Some late night browsing on GitHub made me a very lucky manager as he’s so far the best hire of my 1st decade in technology. Too bad, he’s not drinking yet

Last week, his 4th with us, he told me I was wrong using the word “ratio” to qualify some metric for the social recruiting product we’re building at matchFWD. I first resisted as he couldn’t come up with a proper alternative and because I was pretty sure it was a ratio. Turns out he was right as a ratio is

an expression of the quantity of one substance or entity in relation to that of another; the relationship between two quantities expressed as the quotient of one divided by the other.

and it differs from a proportion

in that the numerator is not included in the denominator. Thus x/(x + y) is a proportion, x:y is a ratio.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/ratio#ixzz1fAYUo8sv

I think using the right words is incredibly important when programming as well-written and well-labeled code is, in my opinion, the best type of documentation (yet often not sufficient).

But the real thing is: I got schooled by my new hire!

And I think it’s great!

You need to encourage your team to speak up on issues they’ve identified and encourage them to come up with a better solution.

That’s not sufficient though. You also need to fix the issue. And I am faulty, I haven’t yet fixed all the variable names. But you know what? That’s the first thing I do tomorrow morning. Why? It’s clearly not a top priority, the misusage of “ratio” is invisible to users and nothing is broken. It doesn’t matter.

If you want your people to keep coming up with suggestions of improvement, take action when they do or you might just repress one of your best source of continuous improvements.

I am not saying you need to fix every little bits and pieces that one guy thinks are not perfect or you’ll never launch your product or release the new version. They should know better anyway right? Use your judgement but make sure everyone as a voice and that their voice as meaning.

And that’s how you start building a team.

If you’re part of a team or looking for a new opportunity, make sure your boss can handle being schooled by his team.

Related articles

• Scaling GitHub’s Employees (zachholman.com)
• How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important (zachholman.com)
• Knyle style recruiting (warpspire.com)

If you’re a co-founder,  CEO or simply the boss of the company, everything that sucks about it or that fails is your fault.

Don’t even think of blaming the new guy, the young guy or the guy who left for a week in the Bahamas.

If one does not know what to do, is not qualified or hasn’t documented how to re-configure the message queue system, it’s because you weren’t there to make sure things were OK.

So next time you’re about to send an email to blame someone, forward it to yourself.

I have a focus problem like most people who likes to build stuff. Therefore I am glad to be surrounded by people that get me back on track when I talk about nice-to-have or features that won’t really move the needle to get us where we want to go.

But I’ve stopped listening to anyone that do not believe in the product vision shared by my co-founder and myself. That do not believe what we envision can be built and disrupt things (no buzzword intended).

Every time you listen, you allow doubts to creep in. Useless. You have no time or energy for that.

Stop listening. Just Build It.

I always find myself figuring the best route to complete all tasks.

What do I want?

An app to …

• Alert me when I am close to a business related to an item on my TODO (integration with YellowPages API?).
• Integration with Google Maps so when I plan a route (by car, bike or transit), it chooses not the shortest path but the better usage of my commute and my trips to scratch off items from my TODO list.

NOTE: found that old (2007) post about something like that, but with antiquated technology and UX. Give me an iPhone/Android app.

I’ve been working with software engineers for 13 years, more often than not as one of them.

They come in various shapes and types but often as slightly introverted people. Not always the most talkative.

They’re smart people, so if they have a problem, they will talk about it. But if not, they often just do their thing.

I am not a big fan of meetings in general. But I think it’s good to force your team to talk to other devs about exactly what they’re doing, just to get feedback. Maybe a co-worker

• has solved that problem before
• knows a great library to do it
• will tell you it’s simply not worth going that route for X or Y.

So if the office space has been silent for too long and nobody is committing code, start talking. Ask to ignite conversations, don’t wait for them to ask for help.

Here’s how I feel about starting up a techno company with a so-called innovative idea after 5 months. The tone is a bit different than after the first month.

• You are stressed all the time.
• You get pity look once a week. Would happen more often if you’d leave the office more.
• You feel pressured to launch asap for no good reasons. ‘lean blah blah blah’ ‘profitable in 2 hours blah blah lean puppy diarrhea’
• You forget to shower daily.
• You start blaming your superstar developer for features that do no even exist on hosting plans you don’t need.
• You haven’t watched the Habs loosing the series.
• Your girlfriend still has no clue what you’re doing and where you were at 1AM on a Thursday nite.
• You miss all the good days to go cycling. When you look outside, it’s raining. Spring in Montreal is great.
• The TODO list never gets shorter. It creates its own verticals.
• Hiring is ridiculously long and hard. And sometimes a Big Apple defeats you
• You start thinking that your friends in the online porn business have it way too easy.
• Just when you’re about to go live, some smart-ass tells you that without the proper marketing plan it are already too late.

So you better pick an idea that is fun to code so at least you can enjoy some solitary pleasures.

If you smiled once reading this, consider signing up for our private beta here.

If you smiled twice, consider sharing matchFWD on Twitter or Facebook.

Cheers,

I come from c/c++ and I like my ternary operator. Simply great for short and simple condition-assignment.

Since i’ve  started using python (about 18 months), I have problems remembering the proper way to do this (ADD anyone ?), simply because Guido went for a “great to read” but “impossible to think” way of expressing it.

So here’s for me and others to remember (I’ve also put it on a huge post-it above my desk) :

c version is –> conditionalExpression ? valueIfTrue :valueifFalse;

python version is –> valueIfTrue if conditionalExpression else valueifFalse

We need data for @matchFWD.

A lot.

We need data to help us suggest the best  talent matches for an open job opportunity to our connectors.

We’re only 2 developers, and I spend too much time not coding so we need help.

There’s currently 2 API that buzzed trying to evaluate influence, reach, reputation and authority of Twitter users : Klout and PeerIndex.

I am not really interested by most metrics right now, but I want to know what topics a user tweet about. Lucky for me both API have such a method so I ran a small manual test on Twitter users I know and follow well enough to judge the results

Here are the results…

Ben Yoskovitz (byosko)

• Klout : ”Entrepreneurship”,”social media”,”Human Resources”
• PeerIndex : “private equity”,”venture capital”,”finance”,”marketing”,”montreal”

GeorgesDuverger

• Klout : “Montreal”,”Yul”,”Developers”
• PeerIndex : “free software”,”realtime web”,”google chrome”,”science”,”api”

Carl Mercier (cmercier)

• Klout : “Montreal”,”Met”,”technology”
• PeerIndex : “databases”,”data management”,”digital media”,”ipad”,”iphone”

DavidDesjardins

• Klout : nothing….
• PeerIndex : “cycling”,”andy schleck”,”bessette”,”bicycle sharing system”,”cervlo”

Martin Dufort (mdufort)

• Klout : “iPhone”,”Apple”,”Google”
• PeerIndex : “iphone”,”cloud clients”,”embedded linux”,”apple tv”,”nexus”

Seb Provencher (sebprovencher)

• Klout : ”"Montreal”,”Marketing”,”Quebec”
• PeerIndex : “marketing”,”mass media”,”realtime web”,”digital media”,”bing”

Alex Dao (alexdao)

• Klout : “Montreal”,”Retailers”,”Regions”
• PeerIndex : “montreal”,”realtime web”,”google search”,”marketing”,”villemarie montreal”

Myself

• Klout : “Quebec”,”Techno”,”Francophone”
• PeerIndex : “mass media”,”collaboration”,”marketing”,”community websites”,”criticism of facebook”

Klout seems to limit the number of topics to three and is much more generic. If I had to classify my users in large bucket, that could be interesting but it wouldn’t make it easier to identify specifically everyone in my twitter feed.

PeerIndex results are much more precise and diverse. The downside, I would guess without testing, is that they are probably much more volatile. The topics you rank for this week, won’t be next week topics… So how do you deal with this… You weight all tags you attach to your users ?

What am I going to use ? Most probably both. Now let’s it Stackoverflow API and GitHub API to find great developers…

Do you use these ? How ?

Related articles

• Who needs Whuffie – What’s your PeerIndex at Le Web? (techcrunch.com)
• Real vs Faux ‘Influence’ and why Klout Matters (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Klout Gets $8.5M to Create the Page Rank of the Social Web (gigaom.com)
• Your Klout and PeerIndex Are Something, But Not Everything (scrapsofmygeeklife.com)

I just read  Fred Wilson post on Talent and Bandwidth where he states the obvious need for NYC startups to be recruiting students for internships and great jobs. He mentions a very interesting program called HackNY whose goal is to

Establish a sustainable, repeatable summer program matching computationally and quantitatively expert NYC students with NYC startups

which sounds a lot like the goal of an event I organized twice last year : Bridgecamp.  (@bridgecamp). But HackNY goes one step further by establishing a real program, not just a networking event.

I kinda drop the ball of organizing a second round in September for lack of time and a team, but it seems to be time to bring it back. I honestly don’t care about the name or any politic, I just want to get it going again.  Daniel Haran also commented about it on the Startup Founder group.

Here’s a copy of my comment there as it’s a closed group :

I organized two Bridgecamp events about a year ago aimed at inspiring students to join startups after they graduate or for an internship.

One in McGill where Fred Lalonde gave a great presentation about what is it to be working in a startup and why they should to. Results were mixed as we failed to get the right audience : more MBA/business type than engineering type.

Second was in Laval University where Samuel Bouchard, DuProprio.com CTO told his story and how he’s now launching his own robotic startup. Only engineering students this time.

Only thing is that doing it by myself is a bit too much, even if they are very low-key events. All we need is the proper contact to the engineering departement, a list of startup opportunities in Montreal, a few dollars for pizza and drinks and a great pitch.

After reading about HackNY I thought I had to go back to it. I know the Startupifier guys (Riku and Max) and Sylvain want to help.

Would be great to throw at least two : maybe one in McGill and one at ETS. I was thinking mid-March as I am farily busy until and we want a few good weeks to get a good room of peeps.

Anyone willing to help can email me at thebridgecamp@gmail.com. web : http://bridgecamp.pbworks.com/

Follow us on Twitter : @bridgecamp

Related articles

• Startupifier wants to help students become entrepreneurs (techvibes.com)
• Idea: Y Combinator for Startup Recruiting (adamsmith.cc)
• Why Silicon Alley’s Spat With the City Is Actually Good News (observer.com)
• Time to apply for the hackNY summer fellows program (stat.columbia.edu)