Strangely though, there are no versions of the cheatsheet in PDF format. So with a few quick tweaks to the SVG file I have generated two PDF files – one for A4 and one for US letter. Zack does have PNG files available, but I’m a big fan of PDF so really missed not having them available.

If you find them useful, then track down Zack and say thanks – all I did was reformat them slightly and convert them to PDF

Downloads
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So what is clusterify?
From my observations it is a collaborative platform for developing small applications together with individuals that have a similar skill-set and interest. More information can be found on the Clusterify concepts page.

Clusterify Features
Clusterify has the following features which make it quite a nice platform to use:

• Voting – Once you propose a project on clusterify, other people on the site vote on whether they think it is a good idea or not. The idea being that once you have a groundswell of support for your project, you should then get your team together and knock out your project.
• Project Membership – If someone likes a project, they should vote for it. If they like a project and feel they have the time and skills to contribute to building that project, then they should join the project. The idea of the site is to collaborate with other developers, not just go solo.
• Karma – Karma is a concept that is implemented on a number of sites, and as per my post on twitter karma and kudos is prevalent in most social media. Karma in clusterify is a rating based on the number of projects that you have completed, and additionally the quality of those completed projects (not sure exactly how that works – feel free to comment on this guys).
• Events – I really like this one, and married with two kids “mature coders” should jump on board with this – given of course we get permission from our better halves The idea is that you can organise an event in which many people will collaborate together to deliver a project. Now the event can be held in a physical location or virtually, either way, events are a great way to get a bit of buzz happening.

Is it right for me?
If you are someone that is interested in doing some social coding (with the potential of growing that into something more perhaps), and you don’t feel you have to keep all your ideas secret (heck I’ve got more than I have time) then Clusterify really is worth a look. It could use a lick of paint, but in terms of functionality it’s great.

Concept Buzz on Clusterify
Well I created a project page for Concept Buzz on clusterify, so if you would like to see it get built or be part of building it, then free free to vote or join up.

The GAE tools library started it’s life with me calling it “Twawler” or basically a twitter search wrapper, but it grew to include other functions inside the library the meant it deserved a more generic name. The high level functions are are described below:

SlicedTasks
With the introduction of CRON jobs into AppEngine when google released their Java support, the possibility of background processing for appengine applications became a reality. The limitation, however, is that a cron job on appengine executes in a similar manner to a web request and thus will terminate after 30 second of activity. The Sliced Task class (very raw at this stage) is designed to maximize your processing that you can do in the context of this request, but not terminate and leave you hanging. It’s proven very effective for my twitter search implementation and would work very nicely with processing any kind of data that can be treated as a queue.

Twitter “Twawler”
A library that wraps the twitter search API. It’s very rudimentary at this stage but will be extended in the future. The major victory here is that it implements oauth authentication instead of basic authentication. The trick here at this point is that as I’ve designed it to run with background tasks, on your first call to the your processing script you will need to pass an “init=True” parameter to the script (eg. http://blah.com/tasks/backgroundprocessor?init=True). You will then be taken through the oauth handshaking process and once complete the access token stored in the database.

Additionally, configuration information is stored in a yaml file under a conf directory for your GAE application (/conf/twitter.yaml). The content of this file is basically:

consumerKey: your-oauth-key
consumerSecret: your-oauth-secret

Searching for tweets works quite well at the moment, and I have an application deployed to appengine and as I want to make sure the performance is within tolerances for the free limits on appengine (so far, so good).

If you would like to get a copy of the code, then free to head to either the Ohloh site for the project, or to the Google Code repository

Any feedback on the library would be appreciated, and I’d suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed for updates on the library itself or applications I’m building that use it.

The coworking movement looks really interesting to me – eventually I hope to go out on my own and create a successful startup, and what better place to spend the infant years of your startup that doing that with like-minded individuals. It just makes sense. I mean most of my ideas come to me when I am driving home from a day of work, so whilst at the time the ideas is formulating I am on my own, the idea is generally related to a conversation I have had with someone that day.

So, therefore, if I went out on my own and worked from home then firstly I wouldn’t be driving anywhere (and thus get my thinking time) and secondly, I wouldn’t be mixing with people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thus I could potentially get stuck in a rut… coworking seems like a great way to combat that. Not only that, but it’s an effective way to set up shop somewhere without the massive initial overheads.

Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).

What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.

One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.

Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).

Part of my vision for the conceptual advantage site is to use it as a mechanism to push out some of my ideas for critique on the global stage. Some might think this seems like a ludicrous concept – why would you share an idea that someone else could potentially deliver on and make themselves a lot of money with? Well for one, I know that without some of the external motivators I require, I will probably never deliver a single one of my ideas. Secondly I feel confident that I have enough ideas (be they good or bad) that I could afford for a couple to be delivered by others if that means I deliver on some of those myself.

The Concept – A website for gauging concept interest
So how do I plan on generating some of this external motivation and enthusiasm to get things done? For now this blog serves as a mechanism for that, but based on my own experience it takes more commitment from a visitor to leave a comment than it would to simply give a thumbs up or down to an idea.

So what next? At this stage the plan is to set up a website that enables someone to register and submit a concept to be evaluated by visitors to that site. Additionally, I envisage using social bookmarking style bookmarking buttons to both communicate and gather interest for the concept – for instance, if the site was up and running this article would have a little widget in the top right corner saying “18 buzz – get on board” (or something similar).

Additionally, rather than force a potential fan of the concept to register on the site also (really I don’t want to force people to register with sites more than they have to) – I would probably explore using existing social bookmarking sites to assist with aggregating buzz for a concept. For instance, I can envisage a number of urls being associated with a particular concept: an initial blog post, a project site, the conceptbuzz.net site page itself, etc, etc and the amount of buzz for that concept should be the aggregate number of social bookmarking links for any of those urls.

So what would all that buzz mean then? Well for myself, I would commit myself to a concept relative to the amount of buzz. For instance, I see a concept moving through a number of phases before it’s released as a finished product. Lets say it goes from concept > prototype > public beta > release. In that case, I would set myself some “buzz thresholds” to inspire me to move it to further phases. In the case of idea A, I might determine that 100 buzz is sufficient for me to build a prototype of the idea, but for idea B I would want to see 2000 buzz before embarking on building a prototype given the complexity of the idea.

In closing, while I think the conceptbuzz.net site idea represents some risk around exposing your concept before having something in the market and competing, I believe this can be a measured risk for someone like myself. Let me know what you think. If you think it’s a good idea and something you’d like to see then use some of the key principles that I will implement (commenting, social bookmarking, etc) and get me motivated to deliver something! Additionally, let me say I welcome critical feedback too – happy to have someone shoot holes in the idea or throw questions in the mix that will cause us all to think.

Updates:
2009-03-23:
Modified conceptbuzz.net to www.conceptbuzz.net as I’ve started using Google AppEngine for hosting.

“What is it that makes some programmers more effective than others?  Not quicker, not more technically elegant or advanced, just more effective.”

I think it all comes down to balance – having a mix of skills that make you accessible to the business world whilst keeping a foot planted firmly in the realm of software development.  In a lot of large corporations these days the need for this balance is reduced (well at least it seems to be), as the analyst programmer has been broken apart into two distinct entities; that of the business analyst and the applications developer.  However, the company in which I work this is not the case, and my team of developers is engaged (through myself) directly by the business to design and deliver software solutions – be they large or small.

Displayed to the right is a diagram that attempts to capture some of the aspects I believe go into creating this balance.  Now I very much doubt that everyone will agree with the breakup, and I really welcome some input as to what people believe belongs in each of the quadrants (even as I write this I’m considering some modifications to the diagram).

One thing I would stress in all of this, is that I don’t have the expectation that everyone needs to be have coverage in each area to be useful.  However, if a programmer is weak in one particular area then by teaming them up with another individual (or more) then an appropriate balance can be achieved.  It is for this reason that for my team, I am thinking about moving to a model where work is allocated to small teams to design and deliver rather than any one individual.  This in turn should assist with growth of staff plus the amount of ownership they take over the task presented to them.

Obviously, there is nothing new with having people working together in teams.  Often, however, this is done for the purpose of delivering larger projects rather than just smaller day-to-day tasks.   Additionally, whilst I believe good managers will be able to form good partnerships in their teams by using “gut feel”, spending time to purposely evaluating team members on individual strengths and weaknesses to achieve balanced partnerships is very worthwhile.

At this stage I am not thinking of implementing pair programming as I guess I can’t see the benefit of having two people with one keyboard to cut code can improve productivity (even given there is an ongoing peer review and consultative process involved in the development process).  I will say, however, I am no guru on agile programming techniques so welcome discussion around how to make this process work, and to here others experiences around things like pair programming and associated techniques.