Own your network, Own your client

Own your network, Own your client. What do we mean by that ?

When building a SaaS based model, companies built strong systems for their clients to use. All the latest web 2.0, 3.0 features and implement the security best practices, but many of them fail to make basic statistics available to them.

I've tried to list a few of the short-comings companies should look at resolving;

• Usage Statistics: If you bill the client per transaction and the amount of load they use on the system, its always nice to have this information available at the customer information screen of the application.
• Billing Information: Invoices and bills should be readily available in the system. Build a billing engine right into the application, saves the finance team a lot of effort processing invoices on a monthly basis and then following up with the clients.
• Auto-payments: You don't want to be left in the limbo, with the client not paying on time and keeping you stranded without money for months. In this age of advanced e-commerce and online banking, its advisable to go the extra mile and integrate an auto-pay system into your application.

iAd for iPhone, what does that mean for Google

Apple just presented a preview of iPhone 4.0. Off all the bells and whistles with multitasking and other features released in this version, the most interesting one is iAds integrated into the iPhone api.

Salient Features;

• 60% of the revenue is shared with the developers.
• You as a developer can directly embed ads in your app from the api
• The ads will be sold and hosted by Apple.
• They have a limitation on how many ads will be served per-day, per-phone, per-app

So what does that mean to other ad-serving companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc...

Read more »

Annoying Geo Targeting

Ever see those annoying ads on websites you are visiting, which advertise services or locations around where you are currently surfing. How do they figure out where you are??

Such kind of targeting in the online media world is called as "geo-targeting". Every computer or device that connects to the internet gets an IP address assigned to it. These addresses are assigned based on your location, so if you are in North America your IP will start from 63.*.*.* or 64.*.*.*. If you are in Asia, your IP address will range in 202.*.*.* or 212.*.*.*, so on and so forth. These addresses are further drilled to second and third level based on the subnet mask.

Read more »

Hot Deployment issues

The build always makes it to the staging and production server after a series of rigorous tests. This ensures the build is complaint with the requirement and that none of the old features have been compromised in any way. Once in a while, a rare, but an annoying "Scope Creep" scenario does happen.

Just minutes before the demo some one would realize a missing feature or patch which missed the commit deadline and did not make it to the server. So as a quick temp fix we just deploy that file to ensure the code does not have to go through the grueling tests again. Some of the smart developers don't commit these hot patches to SVN or merge it with the patch branch, losing the feature again. 

Read more »

Project Management and Issue tracking tools: Redmine vs Trac

I've been beating around the web searching for a good solution, that can scale from a microISV team to a mid sized team. We've been using svnrepository.com for sometime. They provide svn and git as a SCM,  also trac with multiple plugins for project management.

Off late they've upgraded to a new system which offers redmine, along with trac and also has support for mercurial. After searching the web for a few minutes, I hit upon this article at stackoverflow;
Trac vs. Redmine vs. JIRA vs. FogBugz for one-man shop? Check through the article, you might find it useful.

If you are looking for online svn hosting, this website might be useful to you. http://www.svnhostingcomparison.com. It provides you with multiple options available in the market. You can filter depending on the cost, disk space and other features.

Adhoc or Agile

I wanted to hot link to an old post by Simon Brown, but I believe he's dropped his old blog and transformed into a more consultant type blog. I'm copy pasting the old post here, with link to the original post.

In the vast majority of cases where these phrases are used, agile has mistakenly been used to mean that the development process in use is ad hoc or even non-existent. It's not hard to get to the bottom of what people mean by agile, particularly in interviews, with a few simple questions. Usually, the flow of conversation goes something like this.

Read more »

Customizing JIRA workflow

Like other cool companies we also use JIRA for issue tracking; and we are agile using it. JIRA has posted a very useful article on how  to go agile using JIRA [http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEVAL/Using+JIRA+for+Agile+Development].

Since JIRA gives you an option to customize the workflow. We've added some more details extending the normal 4 step JIRA workflow to a 6-7 step workflow.

Read more »