Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Building for Enterprise Solutions

So the real business opportunities are in enterprise solutions we’re told but no one is building for enterprise. Why is that you ask? Well the title gives it away, it’s not sexy.

— Of Cours People Aren't Building for the Enterprise, It's not Sexy by Curtis McHale

Of course no-one finds the enterprise sexy, exciting, cutting edge or anything like that. Also the vast sums of money needed to build enterprise products is also a road block. Attracting new developers and businesses to build enterprise products is quite a challenge. I've always wondered what a ERP product built using Rails would perform like.

Anyone need an ERP product built using Rails? I've got the time, if you have the money.

Getting the right customers

One thing that has continually bugged me about the Journalong journal entry screen is the social widgets that I put on there. They serve no other purpose than to inform the user about how popular Journalong is within each social network. When you are about to write your daily journal entry, the last thing you want to see is the tweet count for Journalong.

I also believe it's a pointless measure of success and amounts to nothing more than a popularity poll. I'd like to think that the customers Journalong is attracting, base their decision to subscribe on getting value from a plain text journal they can write to from anywhere.

So last night I removed the social widgets from Journalong and it's already looking like a much nicer place now.

Firefighting. I've been doing this for most of the last three weeks. It's the onslaught of unforeseen tasks and issues that take you away from the work you had planned to do. It's the ad-hoc requests and "emergency" problems that try to rob you of a productive day.There's nothing less motivating than firefighting most of your time at work and gradually seeing those deadlines slip again and again and again. Thing is, too much firefighting can be averted in most scenarios. Here's a few tips which I found quite good. It's mostly common sense, but I sometimes lack this human trait!

  • Identify the source of your firefighting - First of all make sure you know where all your firefighting issues are coming from. The most important step. More likely it's a single person or organisation than a random number of people or organisations.
  • Filter all incoming fires - Make sure to route all firefighting issues to the right person. As a developer, I'm often mistaken as the "go to guy" for a particular project or software. In reality, these issues should first go to someone else first, before they come to me.
  • Schedule time for firefighting issues - Once the issues have come in, block off some time later on in the day or week for dealing with these issues. It should be a maximum of two hours per day. Spending too much time on firefighting issues is counter-productive and a real motivation killer. Believe me, I've been there.
  • Think about a long term solution - Firefighting should be a short term phase. You shouldn't allow this to be come part of your daily work. When resolving issues of this natrue, ask yourself "could this happen again?". If the issue probably will, then think about a long term solution that will stop the issue continually coming back to you.

Most firefighting work is work that we can put off for a later part of the day or week.​ Don't let your day go to pot with putting out fires.